500 owners were too cheap to buy new machines and pirated all their software?

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qz3fwd said:
Well dont some say the Amiga died because all of the 500 owners were too cheap to buy new machines and pirated all their software? JK. Had to say it.
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So above was mentioned in a post about PiStorm.

Can we talk about the above statement honestly? No need to JK. Did we kill the Amiga because we killed the Software TAM and companies developed less for it?

To start, I think it is unfair to those who owned a 500 - which I bet at some point was all of us, before we bought a big-box perhaps.
It's a sneaky way to claim anyone who had another model didn't do this. Meanwhile, those other models had hard drives that were often loaded with productivity software...not exactly purchased.

So, Amigans all did it. Only if a company was paying the bill did you not. I remember when someone made LightWave 3D possible without the dongle I think it required. Cracked?

Were we to blame that the Amiga didn't become the platform to develop software for? Was it the time period - with software being well written and very compact in terms of size, and storage capacities exploding along with bandwidth so that software could be "napstered" easily? I remember people sold PC CD-ROMs in the early CD-R days with all types of PC software for $50 bucks - so piracy clearly wasn't just an Amiga issue. But was perhaps the pricing model on the Amiga an issue that didn't help overcome the piracy - many high quality productivity software packages on Amiga were very much lower cost than equivalent capacity software on PC or Mac. I mean...PhotoShop for PC/Mac was CRAZY expensive compared to ImageFX, and I remember Adobe CreativeSuite being $3000 range at one point before Adobe took it to the current subscription model most people dislike. Compare that to $100 Amiga version of this type of software. Some excellent ones included free with RTG cards.

I often think that Steve Jobs just re-did the whole Amiga 4000 Toaster solution on Apple with FireWire port as interface and basically stole the killer Amiga app upon which Apple has been built since. Those iMacs with iMovie...what the heck was that? FinalCut - what was that but a straight up Amiga 4000 Toaster rip off? ...but I guess that's another thought.

So...what to make of the above statement? Can't deny though when you see 500s for sale they often come with disk cases full of copied games, right? "400 floppies included!" Confession time? :)
 
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Piracy was great for Commodore. I never bought a single brand new game when I was a kid. We all copied C64 games we borrowed from each other in primary school. Then in secondary school we all got Amigas and copied floppies instead.

It must've been a nightmare for software companies though.
 
I don't think software piracy on PC was less than on Amiga. The difference though was the size of the market. Obviously the PC market was much larger compared to Amiga, and that made a difference to absolute numbers of products sold even if the PC had equal or greater percentage of pirated software. That difference would certainly impact the viability of commercial Amiga software development.
 
Piracy didn't kill the C64. I think that it actually increased sales because of the ease of copying. With the Amiga piracy was a bit trickier, from what I remember, and perhaps some of the software developers were gunshy. I transitioned from my C64 to an Amiga 1000 in 1989 - just as I started into my career. So I now had money to spend on software I might have previously copied. What has been said all along about the death of the Amiga is still the main factor - lack of proper management and marketing.
 
Nah. Commodore killed this off due to incompetence and mismanagement. Remember back in the day that software was easily obtainable for both Amiga and PC. Even went to Amiga/computer meet-ups every week to get hold of the latest pirated releases whilst taking my A500 and then A1200 in the early 90’s. It was rife. But I also did buy games from little independent shops as well.
 
Copy protection killed it for me

Dragon 32. Me and a mate bought a game each and copied it for each other. Still meant 2 sales.

C64 same just a little more difficult. A few of us clubbed together and bought a few games and made each other a copy. Still sales.

Amiga most games had copy protection on the disc or a manual wird / picture check.. Difficult to do the club together and share thing. So we ended up meeting up with a pirate buying pre-cracked games then copying for each other
No sales to the company and the pirate made the money instead.

Gog has proven that drm free works. Proof is in my gog library size inc a couple of full priced titles like cyberpunk for pc.

Greed killed the amiga not the players.
 
Boing-ball said:
Nah. Commodore killed this off due to incompetence and mismanagement.
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I know it's easy to claim silly theories decades later, but I have wondered if that incompetence was accidental on if some inside agent was playing for another team from within. It just seems so counter intuitive. Any leadership would drive revenue and sales forward and find ways to do so. And with the Toaster - they had the killer app to push towards.

Also, was the product the right product at the right time, or was the Amiga ahead? Or maybe behind? Considering that Apple re-did the Amiga Toaster 4000/Flyer thing a decade later with great success, moving massive units, taking over this segment and building a war chest for launch of iPhone and iPad - I'm thinking the Amiga product (as a complete solution) was ahead of the market.
 
Okay, let's look at it from the other side.

If software companies, who wrote things for Amiga, wouldn't make enough money, most of them would have been out of business.
Doesn't matter if it's games or programs.

I mean Deluxe Paint I, II, III, IV and V.
Lotus I, II and III
And so on and on.

Combine all platforms game/program producers who were or are active, and they have enough to survive from the people that actually do buy it.
And last but not least, if a game or program that was copied was very good, even those people would buy the original one, either new or used.

So that is also a thing to consider here.
And then I would say, no, it didn't kill the Amiga or C64.

Commodore was killed by bad management and short sighted vision on the future of the computers.
 
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@Buzzfuzz The thing is, with that recent video where the guy does some CSI from financial reports about total Amigas sold, it was just a touch sub 5 million.

Now, he has the German numbers, and the 500, 500+ and 600 - basically the same computer represents 80% of Amiga unit sales. If you take the Zorro equipped systems, we're talking sub 10%. Germany is 1/3 of all unit sales too. If we assume that this can be applied to other geographies, then there are a few immediate issues that stand out.

1. Amiga is not a highly deployed business platform. In fact, it has no share to speak of compared to PC and Mac.
2. Majority of sales appear to be wedge systems, probably sold to students. Good market to get into, but these students didn't transition upward in the product range.

So, considering that over nearly a decade the TAM is 5M users, and 80% of them wedge buyers for probably gaming...what is the software market available to manufacturers to tap into? Smaller than we think likely.
 
Statistically most pirates did own A500s because more A500s were around than other machines. This does not mean that if you bought the cheap machine you were then too cheap to buy software, all Amiga owners were like that to some extent. I don't buy the idea that copy protection killed sales because you could not make a reasonable amount of copies within a small group of friends.

Piracy is a strong reason for the death of Amiga. Pacific Microlab (Australian computer chain) where I worked did not want to know about Amiga because the software just didn't sell. The computer stores that did sell Amiga often employed young Amiga users... who would copy the disks of everything off the shelves if they could and trade after hours with their friends. At least one I know was in a warez group. Demo parties were about floppy copying as much as demo writing. Every local market had a guy with a van who would copy anything from his 4000+ disk collection for a few bucks a disk, including the blank.

Of course Commodore was inept in their marketing - if IT managers and universities had been convinced that is probably all it would have taken - and it was obvious the technology was lagging when Wolfenstein 3D appeared, but it just wasn't possible for developers to get off the ground with Amiga software because as soon as a thing was released it was cracked and spread.
 
I have vague memories of Amiga back in the 1990’s and was impressed with the OS at the time, but I never once saw an actual Amiga until 2020. Not in school, not in retail stores, not in university, and not in business. By 1990 it was clear Motorola was going to kill both Atari and Amiga, and Amiga had lost its technological lead it had in 1985. I do recall piracy rampant on x86 at the time, but the market was orders of magnitude larger. With the 500 really representing the complete Amiga market and what was the development target it killed any real progress IMO. Long live the Amiga.
 
Commodore killed itself in the end. Watch or read any book or film on the subject... Those at C= have all said it.

Piracy or not, software is just the tip of the iceberg... Unfortunately, a lot of the early games were poor crossovers and complete dross. I bought a couple of games and could not help feel but ripped off. For me it was the school playground where I got most of mine.

As for A500 owners of the time, they were kids, I was a kid, the hell you think I'm gonna get ££ from?? Parents wouldn't buy anything other than educational stuff, and as for upgrading, Jesus, birthdays and Christmas! Took a whole year before I got that 1/2mb belly slot expansion card... Then DPaintIII anim worked!

So yeah, little drop, big Ocean... Irvine Gould nd the other tosser Medhi seemed intent on sinking C= and trying to wring every last drop out of the company...
 
How did kids afford games? I don’t know, perhaps the same way they got games on game consoles at the time perhaps?

It really is a shame that the country that created the Amiga had an almost non-existence presence in the country in the marketplace.
 
@qz3fwd - what other "console" of the time made duplication as simple as on the Amiga? Remember those 100-in-1 NES cartridges? You know...that Toaster even in 1993/1994 was quite a good piece of kit, even if the AGA was slightly insufficient, the Toaster did 24bit frame buffer and CD quality sound with Flyer (I can't wait to try out both on a 4000 I'm cleaning up for a Toaster setup...30 years late!)

I would say that the larger Zorro slot equipped Amiga computers did better in North America than in Europe. If in Europe they were 10% of sales, I'm going to say that in North America they were double or even triple, because the Toaster was a big thing here and it was NTSC only.

@Karlosjackel - there was a lot of crappy software. Let's remember we have the video game crash of 1983 and in 1985 Amiga comes out. There was bound to be some ideas porting of games from that crash. It wasn't that long back on the calendar. Usually this 80/20 (sometimes 90/10) rule applied, and I bet you it was true on the Amiga. As in:
80% of the software was crap, 20% was good.
80% of the revenue was realized by the 20% of the software.

...but....we're only talking about a 5M Amiga unit install base world wide. That's quite a disappointment to be honest.
 
Yes the tiny install base made supporting Amiga difficult for many businesses. Commodore did not help.
 
Hardware-buying users make a platform, and determine whether it prospers or fails. Commodore made its money selling Amigas (and other hardware) not software. Software developers didn't abandon the Amiga until well after Commodore's bankruptcy. The lack of blockbuster titles on the Amiga before that had little, if anything, to do with not enough attention from developers. Developers paid more than enough attention to the Amiga, given it's extremely small user base by the early nineties. If anything it was a surpise it got as much attention as it did. In fact the drying out of high quality AGA titles *followed* the poor reception and sales of the A1200 / CD32, did not precede it. Ultimately, it was the hardware limitations of the platform that doomed it in the age of Wolfenstein and Wipeout. Hardware-buying users moved to other platforms, where piracy also continued and didn't cause their demise.
 
Piracy also continued and didn't cause their demise because every IT manager said "you must use a PC to work here" - and the real money in the 90s was in business software, where legitimacy was easily enforced, corporations couldn't really hide.
 
YouKnowWho said:
@Karlosjackel - there was a lot of crappy software. Let's remember we have the video game crash of 1983 and in 1985 Amiga comes out. There was bound to be some ideas porting of games from that crash. It wasn't that long back on the calendar. Usually this 80/20 (sometimes 90/10) rule applied, and I bet you it was true on the Amiga. As in:
80% of the software was crap, 20% was good.
80% of the revenue was realized by the 20% of the software.

...but....we're only talking about a 5M Amiga unit install base world wide. That's quite a disappointment to be honest.
Click to expand...
I would like to blame *AMERICA* for such a poor unit base! :D - I'm messing here...

The oddity in that 5M is that generally US is patriotic to US products [look at Apple] but I could never understand WHY Commodore didn't make it big, they were in such a good position...

Euroland couldn't get enough... [lets include UK into that fold as well - Although we seem to like to think of ourselves as a separate entity though... :/ ]

But I agree with @YouKnowWho, its the old Pareto ratio there isn't it?

The computer itself wasn't primarily aimed at a particular audience, kids wanted them, they got them, and someone somewhere in "Softwareland" didn't actually think... "Where these kids gonna get the money for the games?" Pocket money [as it was called in the UK in the 90's] was like slave labor! Wash the car - £1, Hoover the house - £1 etc. I think later on when games were released on Kixx [for example] for knockdown prices - that's more like it. In fact, in business, the more turnover for lesser priced products will trump higher costing items, but that's volume you're depending on.

Secret of Monkey Island 2 - £40 on release... My mate Craig did a lot of work to get that [1991] as a school kid... Parents were not going to spend $£ on games and neither were mine!

I understand that software houses have overheads, development costs et al - But that's no excuse for terrible productions, and that further proved to consumers to go pirate. In fact, look at where we are in 2024, what hacks people will do to watch Netflix, HBO et al for free or at a huge discount using Amazon Firesticks... Same difference. Not making excuses for pirating, but the business plan for Commodore [there wasn't one] and software houses didn't cater for the audience - mostly kids with their A500s! Now those kid are 45+ will happily pay for new releases on the Amiga platform - because they are great! [Look at Reloadr Proxima, I got the full fat version with CD]
 
Looking at the management issues where Gould and Ali ran Commodore into the ground while "raping" the company (they made money while Commodore failed), I do not believe that piracy killed the company; as noted, vide supra, all popular gaming platforms suffered from piracy, especially those that used standard computer storage media (in those days, one didn't swap physical ROMs out of a car boot). So I believe that piracy is a moot point.

These days, the Internet (complete with all the "illegal software" - Amibay believes that Aminet files can't be shared on computers sold here), is what is keeping the Amiga alive; the community went 20-years with next to zero (zed?) development, now accelerators, add-on devices, cases (as in the A1200.net and CheckMate), and software development are rebounding - so much so that I recently sold my X1000 because I was using my A4000 & A1200 constantly. I just found a Jim Drew alternative to my a314CP last night with his equally price WiModem 232 Pro. Yesterday, I completed my fourth Sony MPF920E conversion to an Amiga HD floppy drive, and I feel good.

Many new Amiga users are finding the Amiga due to the legacy gaming available through Archive.org/TOSEC and WHDLoad (its ability to 'rip' actual game disks to hard drive accessible files (the ability to archive games on a hard drive without the need to use the floppy).

This is an exciting time for the Amiga (and C64) community, and now that I am retired, and have the free time to rant in this forum, I am enjoying the "*uck" out of this point in time in Amiga history. Complain about piracy, but in many ways it brought us to this point.
 
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