Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucdavis!iris!kuan
From: kuan@iris.ucdavis.edu (Francois Kuan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Games
Keywords: Amiga for me
Message-ID: <5174@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 24 Aug 89 01:48:05 GMT
Sender: uucp@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: kuan@iris.ucdavis.edu (Francois Kuan)
Organization: U.C. Davis - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Lines: 63


    Some of you made some good points and interesting suggestions
about copy protection/piracy, etc. However, I think games don't fall
into this category. Ideally, it would be nice if games were cheaper,
and software in general was cheaper. But in the real world, that's not
how it works. Also, I think you need to differentiate between
utilities and games. Aztec can sell their compiler for 250$, and it's
worth it because developers use it all the time, and Aztec doesn't
sell as many copies as, say marble madness.          
    Utilities don't need to be flashy. They either
work or they don't. In fact, I was playing around with CLI-MATE and
it actually pissed me off because it took so much chip ram it was
hard to multitask. If I had an IBM, it would be great, having those
pretty and colorful gadgets to click on. But I just want to copy 
files from one disk to the other, download something from unix in
the background, and play a game. And I don't have the obese Agnus, so
you see my point. Utilities have a longer shelf life. A good utility
can still sell well after a year or two, while a game loses a
tremendous percentage of its profits after the initial offering. I
do agree that companies should lower their prices, but it just don't
work that way. The IBM market is more profitable, and they probably
could afford to do that. But there are only about 300K amigas in
the U.S., and companies need to stay in business. If they could sell
it for less, they would.                                     
    Games are for entertainment. Theatres charge a lot for a top rate
movie, hardcover books go for 20$, and it follows that game software
would tend to strike people as costly. But the difference here is that
a well made game can give you more hours of enjoyment than a movie
or book, so the bang/buck ratio favors software and results in a
reasonable cost. A game takes just as long to develop as a utility,
if not more, and it makes most of the money within the first two
months, while a utility can rake in the bucks for years (e.g. Lotus).
Also, you have to keep in mind that retailers mark up software quite
a bit. Faery Tale might be sold to a distributor for about 12$ a
piece, the distributor then marks it up a little, and the retailer
marks it up 100% or more over the wholesale price. The bottom line is,
game authors don't make much money. An equivalently
educated/experienced programmer can make MUCH more writing utilities.
You can bitch about the price all you want, but game authors aren't
living like car insurance salemen or real estate agents. And think
about this: A good game for the IBM might sell 150,000 and a GREAT
AWESOME Amiga game might sell as many as 40,000. Amiga game
developers are artists commmiting to a low profit operation because
they believe in the Amiga, and they have their artistic integrity.
Artistic integrity means that an author has chosen to write their
masterpiece for the best machine for the job, not the most profitable
one. Authoring a game for the Amiga a labor of love. Until more people
own Amigas, the prices aren't going to drop.
   I personally think that 30$ is a reasonable price for a top notch
game. 25$ for Dungeonmaster is a fantastic deal. 30$ for Faery Tale is
nothing to complain about. When I walk into a store, I like to see the
nice pretty colorfully designed professional packaging with neat
picture on the cover. You want a game for under 20$, what you'll get
is a disk inside a cardboard box with newspaper wrapping and
"Video Game" hand-written on it. 

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