Pirated Games…

[amigadave]

crawff wrote:

I was wondering if the impact of pirated games for the Amiga seriously contributed to Amiga’s downfall or was Commodore still largely to blame?

If we had brought all are games at full retail price, would Commodore have been in a superior financial position?

I am only curious… I remember reading my Amiga magazines at the time which suggested that Pirated games would spell the end of the Amiga… (as a mainstream system)

As others have stated, the software pirates only caused some of the software developers to stop writing games and applications for the Amiga and write for different OSes instead, not because there was less piracy, but because there were more sales to offset the lost revenue due to the piracy.

I am sure that the pirates had some small affect on there being less games and applications for the Amiga as more and more developers moved to writing for MSDOS, Windows and even MacOS.  That lack of good software late in the Amigas life probably had an affect on sales of the Amiga A4000, A1200 & maybe the CD32 (but we all know that C= couldn't get the CD32's into the USA due to other problems at the end).

Management of Commodore killed the Amiga, piracy just scared a few developers away and that only made it harder for the Amiga to survive at the end.

That is my take on the past in a nutshell, but very simplified, as there were so many other factors.

[amigadave]

How many $20 to $50 games could the average 14 year old afford per month or year from 1985 to 1995?

My point is that toward the end of Amiga production, piracy had affected the number of software developers writing for the Amiga and the number of new games and applications available, as well as the number of computer dealers that carried Amigas, or any software or games for the Amiga, hence your trouble finding the game you wanted at a local store.

Piracy did not cause all of Amigas problems, but I would say after 1990-1992, piracy was doing at least as much, or more harm than it could ever do good by enticing your friends to go buy an Amiga just because they too could pirate a bunch of games.

Without good, new software applications (and games) to run, any computer, no matter how advanced and great, is just a waste of electrical energy.  One of the challenges for our Amiga community to stay alive and thrive is to have coders continue to write and/or port new and exciting software to the AmigaOS3.x, AmigaOS4.x and MorphOS2.x, so please support the few commercial developers that we have left, support the very few Amiga dealers that are willing to stock Amiga hardware & software when no one else will anymore.  Don't PIRATE Amiga software anymore.  It isn't helping anyone, or keeping our community alive. (not intended to be directed at anyone in particular)

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