From: mperry@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: Re: Pirating and Economics
Date: 6 Nov 92 12:01:50 +1300
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

> No, what I said was that it would cost 150$ for EVERY POTENTIAL CUSTOMER
> just to recover costs.  This little beauty cost millions.  If only 50% of
                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> the potential consumers bought it, the others pirated or didn't know about
> it or chose not to, then the company will have to price it at 300$ to stop
> it selling at a loss.  They just *cant* put the price below 150$,
> regardless of increased sales, unless they are trying to dump the market or
> force out a competitor (which I assume they are not, after all there ARENT
> that many competitors in the major software industry - and guess why...) 

And which software was this? 
a programmer can be hired for a year for $50000 US?
a team of 10 work on it for one year. double it for other costs.
We are up to $1 million. 
At $100 each they would need to sell 10000 copies, or
at $1000 each they would need to sell 1000 copies, or
at $1000000 they would need to sell 1 copy to break even.
Adjusting for the difference between selling price and how much the original
company gets may be 400%, depending on how well they market, and how they
market.

At the low priced software the software tends to be sold though middlemen and
retailers, at the higher priced end they tend to sell direct to the buyer.

What you are claiming is pirates are killing businesses, yet a fine tuned
business can adjust to piracy - as do many sucessful software houses. I find
that your claim is extreme, based on failed businesses. These businesses have
counted on X number of sales, and only sold Y (Y being less than X), they look
at the market and see some pirated copies floating around - so blame the
pirates. If they had a look around they would have probably seen more of the
competitions software than theirs - ie they had countered on too many sales of
software which wasn't wanted by the public. If they are worried about pirates,
then they should make their software harder to pirate (not impossible, as that
is impossible). Writing software is no longer a small back yard business, it is
cutthroat competition, and some of the competition is pirates.

It is easy to blame failure on something, but to produce something sucessful,
that takes more work.

If you do produce a good piece of software, try something like this:
- visit a successful software business, and convince them that it is a great
piece of software and how it doesn't compete with their current products. Make
a deal with them to sell the software under their name (it has your name and
theirs on the box) through thier marketing, and have them put some final
touches of software protection on it. If you do this successfully you may
develope into an external arm of their business (you write the software, they
package it and sell it for a fee. You get the advantage of their reputation,
and their marketing ability, while they get their fee, and another piece of
great software attributed to thier name). Both sides win. If your software is
not up to standard (ie shitty) or directly competes with thier main products,
then you have a problem


> And yes, there is a constant increase, but not as much as there can be! The
> U.S. economy is growing this year - are we celebrating that much - no, it
> could be growing three times faster! (no political bias intended here :)
Could that be with government intervention, time has shown this reduces the
quality, more so than your claim that piracy reduces quality. It is about time
americains stopped blaming everyone but themselves for the problems of the US
economy. Since Bush is no longer president, how long will the public like
Clinton? I give him 4 years before people are complaing about him just as
loudly as they are about bush (although he does look pretty to many females,
and can speak better, and has "I'm a working man's son" going for him which
easily swayed people take notice of instead of what he does, and his policies)

> If the car industry was as it was in the 1910's before Ford, then you could
> argue that it was as vigorous as every, General Motors is predicting a
> 100,000$ record profit with 2000 cars sold, and it might even consider .. a
> new model!! 
> 
> (again, seeing how deep GM is right now, this analogy is perhaps imperfect,
> but...)
But thier problem has been:
    - competition
    - more competition
    - over priced
    - lower quality (in some cases)
    - inefficiencies built up over decades
They may claim the competition are pirates, but GM and FORD have purchase how
many other car makers and other cars and pirated ideas?

> Anyway, 'tis heartening that we are both beginning to agree on the real
> debate: whether piracy is a problem right now.  I say it is, and you say it
> isn't.
I find debate quite healthy also. 

> I'm talking about technological change, mainly.  For example, the next
> generation of computers and computer games may be coded to the computer ID
> or serial number, to prevent copying.  I doubt it's uncontrollable.  Have
> faith in technology.
And of course, hope and pray something will be developed that will cure the
problem. Existing software can be installed on a computer. Without cracking the
software cannot be copied to another machine in a working form as the software
is configured to an internal number in the computer somewhere which every
computer has a different number (probably like a serial number). Copy all the
files across to another computer and it just wont work. To reinstall on another
machine you have to deinstall onto floppies and reinstall from the floppies.
You can't reinstal twice from reinstalling only works while write protect is
off and the floppy disk is updated so it will no longer reinstall from floppy
untill deinstalled again. This is on an package I know. It can be
tricked into believing it is reinstalling when it is copying, but that is
another matter. (partition disk, copy files between partitions, two working
copies, now deinstall one and reinstall - have two working copies on two
machines). Your suggestion is already out, and it isn't fool proof.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games