Pirated Amiga software on ebay

[Crom00]

Selling DVD roms on EBAY is one thing. Full fledge commercial product is another.

I can assure you if you made say a TV game unit consisting of pirated games and tried to sell it to QVC or Walmart they would make sure you're legit and all the legal issues have been taken care of.

I hope the IP owners realize that there is a demand for these games. But with the Amigas reputation as an "oprphaned" platform and Amigas Inc's current reputation they don't want to touch the platform with a 10 foot pole. Too much hassle for not enough money.

It's really up to us to preserve this system, Amiga branding and games as it seems no commercial enterprise compitent or motivated enough to do so.

[Crom00]

Until someone steps up there will be folks buying these on ebay. The question is how many of these units are actually sold. You can suspect that IP holders (if interested at all) will do completed listing searches to see how just many retro games are sold on EBAY. Generally whatever that amount is can be mulitplied it X4 or more. You THEN have your starting point for interest level on your potential sell though rate.

In specialty toys some manufacturers  monitor ebay sales of discountinued toy lines. When they see aa particular item selling for ridiculous amounts on ebay or if said item attained a  healthy resale value greater than the orignal price they re-issue that particular item number with new packaging or feature, diminishing aftermarket EBAY value.

I don't think there is enough interest in the AMIGA BRAND retro games market for anyone to care.
So you're then left with a few of choices...

A) download them... or
B) purchase them as a black market package.
C) Collect them as originals in original packaging.

Also the amount of legal wrangling to make such a product work is cost probitive. Lawyers don't work for free (unless they're looking to fill the pro bono quota) or on a high profile case. The Amiga is neither profitable enough or high profile enough.

Until an entity with enough realy business world sense, functionality and follow through skills comes along we're stuck in this rut.

[Crom00]

Fishy fiz.. your dedication is admirable but when the IP holders don't bother protecting their own IP I wouldn't waste your time doing it for them. When the legal pros don't bother to do their job it's becuase they see no $$$ in the game.

So in effect your dedication (perfectly admirable and honorable) simply puts cash in the pockets of IP holders too lazy or incompitent to do it themselves.

It's like feeding prime rib to lazy sharks
in this analogy prime rib= your valuable free time.

That being said EBAY should step up and should be liable for allowing this to be sold. Then

Will the said IP holder take on ebay? In the end it's not about if you're wrong or right but who has the most cash for a legal battle. There's just not enough cash being traded here to show up on any legal teams radar. At best it would be a side project for a legal intern... but even these days interns are "free legal slave labor" their time is better spent on paying clients. A lawyer told me that... so that gives you some insight to mindset of the players inlvolved in this game.

[Crom00]

FYI the Flashback devies were made by the company now known as ATARI (who purchased the rights to the name and the ip for the games from Hasbro well before they made the flashback).

Hasbro did re-releases during their brief tenure as owner of the IP but got rid of the brand rather quickly. I spoke to one insider who revealed the process of getting the Flashbacks out was a big legal hassle and in the end the project wasn't a money maker for them when you considered the NRE costs. Jakks Pacific was able make the number work on their TV games becuase all the tooling and majority of dev work is done in China (as cheap as humanly possible) so NRE costs were much cheper than using USA counterparts. Also Jakks legendary ability to fill a mass market supply chain and secured retailer space certainly helped.

The best course of action is to release these to the public domain for sure. At this point it's more about historical preservation and educational purposes. Histroy is written by the victors but if you speak to the hardcore in the industry and they are well aware of the contributions the Amiga made to the industry. It's up to us "old timers" to school the "young bloods" on this history.

What I do see are companies publishing games on a case by case basis. Pinball Dreams, Super Stardust, etc. If you port the game to a different platform you avoid the whole Amiga rom issue. Emulation seems to leave a bad taste in the mouth of IP holders as they are not administering the sale of the games. At least with WII Iphone and XBlive you have a copy protection system in place.

A more constructive course of action could be to campaining XBlive, Apple or other publishers to re-relase these gems on modern hardware.

[Crom00]

@ Franko:
"Even though as Crom00 says it's up to the IP holders and manufactures to take an interest in releasing old software, what are the chances of that happening when their view is quite simply all to do with making a big profit."

The cost of a TV game platform is too much. These entities want to do this with as little cost as possible. It's even crazier when you communicate with them see how they spend cash in their day to day operations yet kick and scream bloddy murder on all things related to IP and game development. Yet with the legal team every nanosecond is quoted as billable hours. One lawyer told me if he's on the bowl thinking about the case he bills for it. He laughs about it too while asking graphic designers to work for free or minumum wage on his website as "interns".

They like the iphone angle becuase they envision cheap labor, distribution costs and high return on investment.

[Crom00]

"Let the big boys deal with each other? Sounds interesting."

Yes if say xblive wants to for example increase the casual gamer market and address the retro community they have the resources in place to handle licensing and development costs. This is the most appealing as it gets the IP holders a modern revnue stream. Once you start talking about hardware, roms and all that lawyers get headaches. When you pitch an Iphone game you see the cash register sound go off in their head.

[Crom00]

Hi,

Right you are Franko,

Just because the Amiga isn't being made today, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. They should sell all their Amiga game rights to someone like Cloanto, or AmigaKit, so that these people could resell them to us Amiga Collectors, and hopefully they would make them copy protection free and downloadable from some site so that we could buy them on line. Hey if they done that they probably could still make a couple of bucks profit, say if they sold the image at say $10 offering AmigaKit $8 and taking $2 for every sale

smerf

Smerf the problem here is that... again I keep going back to lawyers... Their very nature would prevent this from hapening. It's almost pennywise pound foolish. I know old toy and game guys that would walk up to an IP holder at a trade show, strike a deal for an entire game library on a handshake and release the product. Today so many hands are in the till it just makes it hard to excute such a deal.

At least back in the day old timers would say look, we have this "thing" lets just relases it and see what happens. Viola! it's a success! then they hire the fanboy to see what all the kids are into as a legal aid or gofer, once the gofer displays he can get coffee and answer phones they give him a job. Once that fanboy is in a position of power they then think they know everything and you have a situation similar to the music industry where content is released through a crazy closed system of "experts" who know what will sell and won't and very few folks take chance.

It's funny the Jakks pacific tv game was acquired from ToyMax and that was a brainchild of a man who very much thought "hey let's just try this... !" matter of fact some of the most innovative toys and games come from this genesis.

[Crom00]

Ebays system is kind of a joke. I sold a PS1 to a guy who decided he didn't want it when I refused a refund he told ebay the auction contained several pirated games (all games were commercial) so ebay refunded the money and he kept the PS1.

Another time I totally won an auction then 2 seconds later I went to hit the the pay now button someone else had won. I hit the back button on my browser and took a screen grab of my winning page. When I presented the evidence they came out of left field and chastised me for having illegal software on my machine. You see I was doing graphics in a gfx department at the time and had every legitamate copy of gfx software out there in my dock. These application icons were clarly visible in the dock. Ebay of course didn't answer my emails after that... Pretty pathetic actually.

So I have no sympathy if they got sued for selling copied items... well you know what ?maybe they have... they make so much money with the monopoly they have on auctions perhaps they can absorb the legal costs associated with copyright violations.