http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/ap2/bad/summit.html "The Amiga's Death Sentence"
This, remember, is 1993. Or in AP terms, around issue 30. The report continues:
"Next year the picture looks bleaker than ever, with only two firms looking for more than 10% of their business in the Amiga market. Those that do remain active see it as a "base" machine used for development and to get a game a good reputation to use as a springboard for licensing off into the more lucrative Nintendo and Sega markets.
"But as one Amiga supporter put it: 'Right now you can only make any money if you have a major hit - and then you can't make that much money. It's getting to the point where it's not even useful as a base machine. There's no point in using it as a springboard if it's actually unprofitable.'
"Not one of the panel saw a healthy Amiga market in 1995... As far as the games market is concerned, the Amiga's short-term future is bleak and there simply is no long-term future."
Most of them pretended to blame piracy (or perhaps were so stupid they actually believed it)
This was probably written by Stu Campbell, who doesn't think that piracy was (or is) as big a problem for the industry as some might make out, but surely it must have at least been off-putting to games devs that their work could be copied and distributed so easily on the Amiga and other home computers. - according to the article they had a hard time making money even at the full prices of the day. Would selling more, cheaper have actually helped? Would they have even sold more? The pricing model seems to be based around a relatively low number of expected sales, because perhaps only so many will buy it, whatever the price... There's a lot of overheads to getting an actual box onto an actual shelf and keeping it there until sold so you can only go so cheap anyway.
The big old computer game boxes certainly helped add more tangible value though, I think thats one reason they were often so large and lavishly illustrated and documented, were stores selling games or pretty boxes and manuals?
Copied disks were certainly common items on the playground in the early 90's... I'm not sure what effect piracy has really had on the software industry overall, or whether the market would have worked at a lower price point, but in the 8/16bit computer era, all that tempting cheap/free pirated software must surely have helped shift a lot of expensive gaming hardware for Commodore.
