Piracy - Were you responsible?

[demolition]

I accept responsibility. I alone was responsible for the downfall of the Amiga through my massive collection of pirated games back then.. If it hadn't been for pirated games, I might never have gotten an Amiga in the first place. So as I see it, it was doomed no matter what.

I think stuff like Steam today is a very good solution to fight piracy. It is very easy to use and buy new games. I have bought more than 10 games this last week due to their autumn sale. It used to be that pirating games was easier than buying them and having to deal with DRM/copy protection, but with Steam (and others) this is not the case.

[mrbob2]

Originally Posted by demolition

I accept responsibility. I alone was responsible for the downfall of the Amiga through my massive collection of pirated games back then.. If it hadn't been for pirated games, I might never have gotten an Amiga in the first place. So as I see it, it was doomed no matter what.

I think stuff like Steam today is a very good solution to fight piracy. It is very easy to use and buy new games. I have bought more than 10 games this last week due to their autumn sale. It used to be that pirating games was easier than buying them and having to deal with DRM/copy protection, but with Steam (and others) this is not the case.

Next you will be saying because of the music you downloaded your also guilty of destroying the music industry lol

Just like the PSX, the massive game catalogue and the ability to literally get any game for free is a massive pull.

On the other hand, the PSP vita has no piracy issues, cant run vita isos and its pretty much dead! I bought one early 2012 and got fifa with it. Since then there are 0 games worth buying. Its just re hashed kiddie games.

No doubt sony will blame "piracy" for its pathetic none existence lol but if we did have ISO piracy, homebrew capabilities it would be flying off the shelves!

Imagine a WINUAE port on the vita, full speed, gorgeous screen etc

In some ways, "piracy" is a good thing.

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

Next you will be saying because of the music you downloaded your also guilty of destroying the music industry lol

Just like the PSX, the massive game catalogue and the ability to literally get any game for free is a massive pull.

On the other hand, the PSP vita has no piracy issues, cant run vita isos and its pretty much dead! I bought one early 2012 and got fifa with it. Since then there are 0 games worth buying. Its just re hashed kiddie games.

No doubt sony will blame "piracy" for its pathetic none existence lol but if we did have ISO piracy, homebrew capabilities it would be flying off the shelves!

Imagine a WINUAE port on the vita, full speed, gorgeous screen etc

In some ways, "piracy" is a good thing.

I still maintain it's the reason Windows and Office have such a huge dominance. Especially in non-US countries.

While I didn't own an Amiga in it's glory days, and had an Atari ST sort of late into the game, (I think we got it in 90-91, the Atari Mega STe), we ended up pirating a lot of it simply because it was genuinely easier to get software that way.

But I must say that I find it rather ironic that so many companies blamed high piracy for dropping platform support (Electronic Arts supposedly had said the Atari 8-bit had such a high rate of piracy that they didn't support the ST line that much, but I've also seen articles that stated it wasn't because of that, it was because Atari themselves had done something to piss them off. Can't recall all the details).

"They pirated everything!" isn't true to a specific platform, every platform had tons of pirated software. I think the key of it really is that availability of commercial vs pirated software is what 'killed' the Amiga and Atari ST. I can literally only think of three places that ever sold software for the Atari, the place we bought it, some dude that seemed to be selling stuff out of his apartment and Software etc. This was in Utah during 89-'92.

I also remember things like Frontier: Elite 2 for the Atari ST. Someone I knew had the commercial copy and had a lot of crashes and problems with it. Finally one of us managed to find a pirated copy (oddly the original was two disks, the pirated one had been compressed down to something like 330kb vs two 720kb disks. And was hard drive installable).

Honestly, I think if it hadn't been for piracy, the video game industry probably would have simply crashed again. Dos had only started having decent ports around 92 or so, and even then the systems were far more expensive if you wanted stereo sound and 256 colors, and you also had to be far more technical to get things to work.

I think another one of the things that hurt the non-x86 platforms was the whole "Authorized dealer" stuff. You really didn't need to get any authorization to sell x86 clone hardware, but for both Commodore and Atari you did.

slaapliedje

P.S. Some or most of this probably applies to Apple stuff, but I don't know, never knew a single person until much later that had any Apple hardware. I tend to think the same thing that saves them now, saved them then. Rich jerks who think that because it's more expensive, it's better!

[Mark Wright]

It would be fascinating to look back now, with the benefit of hindsight and armed with some easily researched cold hard facts, at how the main soft cos (whose business plan depended on strong Amiga sales) actually fared in the face of rampant piracy.

!! WARNING - MASSIVE GENERALISATIONS AHEAD, WRITTEN FROM A UK PERSPECTIVE!!

If we agree that the "first wave" of mass-distributed, easily-obtainable Amiga commercial software spans the years 1987-1989, with the "second wave" of releases satisfying huge demand during the machine's commercial peak straddling late 1990 into mid 1992, and finally the "third wave" coinciding with the market falling into irreversible decline by 1993......... if we agree.... then that's a bloody good innings for all concerned!

Early Amiga adopters such as EA, Origin, Cinemaware and Accolade in the US, and Reline, Rainbow Arts, Microdeal, Anco, Psygnosis and US Gold in Europe (all had Amiga releases out in 1987) were forever in the magazines of the day (both editorial and booking ad space) and managed to maintain a release schedule for many years, whilst achieving obvious growth.

Fast forward to the likes of Guildhall, Click Boom and Audiogenic propping the Amiga up in 1993 with probably just a handful of sales for some titles, and yet they still thought it was worth developing a product, mass-duplicating disks, designing box artwork and selling to the distribution network, vying for the dwindling shelf-space afforded to Amiga releases by then.

Were the minnows of 1993 barely breaking even with unit sales in the hundreds - or making a profit? Were US Gold/Factor 5 "satisfied", "very pleased" or "apathetic" about sales of Turrican 1/2/3 in 90/91/92? Did Anco romp home to victory with Kick Off sales in 1989? I'd ***LOVE*** to know.

Just a load of jumbled thoughts.

To end, I'd like to share this with those who haven't seen it. Taken from the billowing word-canyon that is AP2 - basically a text-based director's commentary for the late AMIGA POWER magazine - this pretty much sums up why the Amiga died the way it did.

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/bad/summit.html

[Amigajay]

I think much like the Nintendo DS piracy went hand in hand in actually increasing hardware sales, which in turn increased software sales due to more overall customers than their would have been, piracy was on every format, even consoles had disk rippers, but i dont think anyone can blame piracy for the downfall of the Amiga, Commodore were the only ones to blame for dropping the ball.
For me i would pirate games off a friend at school who brought a whole bag full of games in every week! A few years later when we left school i would buy the originals though, so half and half for me.

[SilentBob]

I'll admit I had very little original software, way less than half and half. I usually spent whatever money I had at anytime upgrading my Amigas or buying something extra for it in other ways. I was a poor student, had no steady job on the side and my parents thought computers were a waste of time and money, so they put nothing into it, hehe. (I had to pay for all my computers out of my own pocket).

[4pLaY]

Guilty, enough said =).

[quahappy]

I knew nothing about piracy until I joined a computer club as mentioned in this post (posted in 2006). Part of it below....

Years ago I had a vast collection of games (who didn't?!), but then on the advice of a "friend", joined a club that you could buy the "latest" games for a fraction of the price. Little did I know that they were pirate copies (even had original labels on the disks. Turns out that, while a handful of them were actual copies of English versions, the majority of them were either non-english, uncompleted or not even the game itself! (STAG on one of 'em comes to mind!). The shame of it when I think back now....

When I think back to the games I had, some of them from other regions, I could kick myself for getting rid of the whole lot. My friends (who had copies) have also long gotten rid all Amiga stuff too. Only thing I've kept is the A1200!! If only I had known back then all the bloody fantastic things that isgoing on in the Amiga retro scene now..... Mystic Meg has a lot to answer for!!

That make me guilty? Let the jury decide lol.