What if? 1990, Amiga games selling for $5.99. Piracy?

[danwood]

 Fish disks - which were anywhere from one to ten programs, depending - were a buck ninety-nine.  And they still got pirated.

the Fred Disk disks were public domain, you were allowed to copy them as you liked and share.  
The price that PD libraries charged was just meant to cover the cost of the floppy disk and the postage, that said, many used to add money on too, but copying Fish Disks was not piracy, it was encouraged.

[Lando]

A game needs to make enough to pay for more than just the physical media and box.  Graphicians, programmers, producers and musicians need to be paid, then there's box art, rent, taxes, duplication, distribution, advertising, electricity, insurance, the retailer's costs.

The app store pricing model has really distorted people's views of what games should cost.

[stefcep2]

A game needs to make enough to pay for more than just the physical media and box.  Graphicians, programmers, producers and musicians need to be paid, then there's box art, rent, taxes, duplication, distribution, advertising, electricity, insurance, the retailer's costs.

The app store pricing model has really distorted people's views of what games should cost.

I'd extend that and say the internet has really distorted people's views of what anything should cost.

In Australia, not a week goes by when the daily papers tell us how we get ripped off.  Most don't understand the economies of scale that are possible in larger markets, the higher transport costs in distributing to people scattered over a nation the size of Europe but with only 24 million, nor the generous wages, paid holidays, sick leave, free health care, super-all of that gets paid from a retail sale.

[nicholas]

A game needs to make enough to pay for more than just the physical media and box.  Graphicians, programmers, producers and musicians need to be paid, then there's box art, rent, taxes, duplication, distribution, advertising, electricity, insurance, the retailer's costs.

The app store pricing model has really distorted people's views of what games should cost.

I'm reminded of the old cliche "Kids today know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

[agami]

Amiga.org 4th June 2013
What if? 1990, Amiga games selling for $5.99. Piracy?

There would be a little bit less but the loss of profits would be huge. This would've had the largest negative impact on the Amiga software ecosystem.

Factors:
Most of the piracy occurred in developing nations, i.e. where even $5.99 constituted a day's wage for the middle classes. This is the same reason there is even piracy for iOS apps today.

In the '80s the largest consumer base for games were adolescents, and this was considered the target market by most publishers. The problem is that adolescents do not have much income, though what they have is considered as entirely disposable. Parents were buying the games and market models would have suggested 0.5 to 1 game title per month. So if the average teen wanted to play more than the games their parents bought them they would turn to other methods. This kind of piracy exists even today in the developed nations.

Until only recently all publishers, be it books, games, music, movies, operated on a 'hits and misses' model, where the profits from the 'hits' pay for the losses of the 'misses'. Predicting market success is not an exact science, there are just too many moving parts. Apart from a few new direct publishing models, most publishers today still operate on hits and misses.

It's not just about making money, it's about making the right amount of money. Too many times in history a product has been withdrawn from the market not because they were losing money but because they weren't making enough money. At $5.99 or even $9.99 the games would have reached a larger audience but would not make enough money to make the business sustainable. This dynamic prevails in mass markets. It's the reason a network will buy a non-scripted (reality) TV show vs a scripted show. Cheaper and attracts more viewers. The scripted show would turn a profit, but less than the non-scripted show.

The Marketing Problem:
The Amiga was the ubiquitous computing machine. Amiga's "chameleon" quality made it difficult for third parties to market for. 1 million Amigas in the market does not equal 1 million gamers. Commodore had extremely poor market stats on usage types; video vs. audio vs. games vs. CAD/CAM vs. office vs. DTP vs. other. They were in the 'moving units' business. Ecosystem support? Bah!

The Amiga was doomed by being a '90s machine born in the '80s and (mis)managed by a company that operated like it was the '70s.

[psxphill]

The Amiga was doomed by being a '90s machine born in the '80s and (mis)managed by a company that operated like it was the '70s.

It's true that the only commodore subsidiary that knew what to do with it was commodore uk.
 
However the problem goes back further than that. It was supposed to be a games machine, but they were really designing a computer. Which seemed to work out better after the video game crash, but it meant that the all things to all people idea started before commodore even knew about the amiga.
 
ECS just wasn't good enough, AGA was too late. But they were competing with computers that could have a new graphics or sound card added without alienating your entire userbase and they weren't cheap enough to compete with consoles.

[Coolhand]

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.