Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Xorg
From: Xorg@cup.portal.com (Peter Ted Szymonik)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Spectrum Holobyte & Falcon
Message-ID: <17339@cup.portal.com>
Date: 18 Apr 89 01:26:08 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 67

THE        Mr. Gilman Louie's failure to accept the fact that his
ISSUE:     original comments on the ST piracy were based on
 
           nothing but RUMOR and MYTH.  (The comment being that
           the ST community is more tolerant of piracy than their
           MS-DOS or MAC counterparts.)
 
THE        A letter which I uploaded about a weeks ago.  In this
REBUTTAL:  letter I used very basic concepts to point out that in
           order for Mr. Louie to properly and realistically address
           the effects of piracy on any machine, he must address the
           factor of MARKET SIZE in addition to the number of units
           sold per machine.
 
THE           Mr. Louie's ORIGINAL UNALTERED 'open letter' which has
EVIDENCE      now appeared on all the major services and in every
EXHIBIT A:    ST and most *non-ST* magazines.  This letter is printed
              in its original UN-ALTERED form in the April issue of
              Current Notes and many other magazines.
 
EXHIBIT B:    Mr. Louie's * ALTERED * 'open letter' in the current
              issue of Atari Explorer (May/June) in which the
              original letter appears with the * DELETION * of the
              paragraph in which Mr. Louie stated the number of sales
              to be expected for a "good-selling" program on each
              type of machine.  These figures were used as a basis
              for my rebuttal.
 
              This paragraph:
 
              "When MacIntosh and IBM versions were released, they
               sold four times the volume of product over the same
               period of time.  Based on the current sales trends,
               the ST developer will be lucky to break even.  A good-
               selling Amiga or MacIntosh product will sell 20,000-
               40,000 copies in its first year.  And IBM title will
               sell 40,000-100,000 copies, yet a top selling ST
               program would be lucky to sell more than 15,000."
 
            Has been carefully and curiously EDITED OUT of the
            original text of the 'open letter'.
 
THE BIG
QUESTION:   >>> WHY??  <<<
 
 
Sales of ST FALCON have soared since the advent of advertising in ST
magazines and the reviews currently being printed in the ST press. In a
4-6 week period over 7,000 copies of ST FALCON have been sold making it
the best selling ST game program both in the United States and Europe. 
I and many other ST owners defended our machine and predicted that ST
FALCON would be the number one best selling program and that ST FALCON
would reach the 12,000 sales needed for it to break-even with ease once
advertising and reviews used the ST user base.
 
I expected that Mr. Louie would accept the facts and events as they
have unfolded in the past two months.  I expected that he would take
the opportunity to show his company's self-proclaimed dedication and
support of the ST to post a retraction, correction, or update of his
previous comments about ST users, especially in light of the fact that
his letter has appeared in non-ST magazines, further damaging the
reputation which and many many ST owners have been fighting to uphold
for years.
 
I leave you with the evidence above to draw your own conclusions.
 
Peter Szymonik