Browsing the internet I came across this interview of me in Your Spectrum from June 1984. It brings up several issues that were very pertinent at the time and which still have resonance today. They have never adequately been explained with the benefit of hindsight so I thought that I would do that now because things were not as they seemed. As a director of Imagine I was involved in all the discussions and decision making that went on behind the scenes. This is the definitive story of what happened.
Imagine software was an amazing success. We doubled turnover pretty much every month until by December 19832003 it was a million pounds a month. A massive figure in those days. In January 19842004 sales collapsed and we were initially at a loss as to what had happened. We employed a lot of young people on the government Youth Opportunity Programme, which kept us in touch with our customer base. They pretty soon told us that nobody was buying games anymore. Tape to tape copying had been discovered and stealing games was a lot cheaper than buying them.
We reacted by sending a letter to all the magazines explaining the damage this would do to the industry. Some magazines published the letter in full and some took a stronger line in not carrying adverts related to piracy. But overall their reaction was pretty muted. Which is surprising really because they relied on advertising revenue from the game publishers for income. Game piracy ended up hitting them too with one magazine publisher, Newsfield in Ludlow, eventually going out of business.
Our next tactic was to reduce our prices. To become cheap enough that customers wouldn't want to copy because they could have the real thing at a low price. This tactic would have worked and eventually did with budget software pretty much taking over the 8 bit cassette game market. However we were ahead of our time and the retailers and trade threw a complete and utter fit at our price reduction. Mostly they said they wouldn't buy our games off us anymore at the lower pricepoint. We were forced to keep prices up.
Because the games were being professionally as well home copied we started printing our inlay cards using a metallic fifth colour. This made it much more difficult to reproduce counterfeit inlay cards.
So next we came up with the idea of a hardware add on or dongle to plug into the game computer without which the game would not run. Initially we looked at putting the Z80 maths co-processor in the dongle which would allow our programmers to write more powerful code. But in the end we settled for putting a ROM in which would allow us to write a much bigger game. Combined with several development breakthroughs we had made this would have allowed us to make some very special games. The megames, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch were born.
But is was not to be. Piracy knocked our income so badly that we could not afford to run the company. There was no money to pay the bills and we went out of business. All filmed by the BBC for their Commercial Breaks programme, which you can still see on YouTube.
213 comments ↓
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
2004?. Tape to tape?. Either you're kidding or your dates are 20 years wrong.
Sorry, but the problem was not piracy but prices from the retailers. Here in Spain, prices where dropped from 3000 pts to 875. Retailers and publishers both did a good amount of money, and piracy all but disappeared for years, until publishers got greedy again and started rising the prices (875 to 2100 in 2 years).
Keep prices down, and come down HARD on people SELLING copied games. THAT's piracy, not just copying them.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
Fixed now. Thanks.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Um, wasn't the problem that you pissed away fortunes on sports cars and motorbikes, and making shedloads of terrible, terrible games like Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser that nobody wanted to buy, trying to pull expensive and ill-thought-out stunts like buying up entire tape-duplication plant capacities so nobody else could get their games produced for Christmas, and wasting all your money on trying to make ludicrous overblown "epics" 20 years too early that would turn out crap anyway?
Or is it just some weird and inexplicable quirk of fate that the companies who made good games, that didn't need a ton of extra hardware bolted onto the computer to run, and didn't buy Ferraris - Ocean, Ultimate, whoever - didn't go bust, despite presumably being pirated at least as much as Imagine? (And probably more so, since their games were much better.)
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
In a word. No.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Really? So all those other companies got pirated less than Imagine? All that money wasted blocking up the tape plant *wasn't* just a gargantuan misjudgement? You *really* thought there was a viable market for 50-quid Spectrum games?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Game piracy ended up hitting them too with one magazine publisher, Newsfield in Ludlow, eventually going out of business."
Er, what the hell did that have to do with games piracy? Quick answer: nothing at all.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Stuart, lots of game companies went bump. If you watch these videos you will see that Ocean were equally impacted by piracy: http://bruceongames.com/2008/02/04/commercial-breaks/
Imagine was most exposed because it had expanded fastest on the smallest capital base.
Also they had stupidly high expenses because they were in prime city centre offices and had moved twice. So they were paying rent on three lots of premises, two of which were empty.
I was there. I was a member of the board of directors and I was involved in all the processes in the article. So I have a far better idea of what actually happened than people who just read about it.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Lloyd, piracy massively reduced the revenue that game companies received. Therefore they reduced their advertising spend significantly. So magazine publishers had a lot less income.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
What I take exception to is you implying that Newsfield went under due to piracy, which is clearly absolute poppycock. Newsfield's eventual bankruptcy was the result of ill-advised tinkering with its key magazines, and misguided attempts to break into new markets (not least with the ludicrously expensive LM, aimed at a market that wouldn't exist for years—rather like the magazine equivalent of Bandersnatch), not because of those scallywags copying games. In fact, one could easily argue that the likes of Crash and Zzap!64 in some ways actually benefited from piracy, since more kids got into games, and the circulation figures rose accordingly.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Not to mention Newsfield's bizarre reluctance to release single-format magazines for the up-and-coming 16-bit computers, the Amiga and the Atari ST.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Also they had stupidly high expenses because they were in prime city centre offices and had moved twice. So they were paying rent on three lots of premises, two of which were empty."
Right. So going bust was about piracy, and nothing to do with renting hideously expensive empty offices? Or the tape plant fiasco, or the Marshall Cavendish deal, or rotten games that nobody would have bought?
(Seriously, if the Speccy had been 100% piracy-proof you'd still have struggled to shift three copies of Cosmic Cruiser, and I don't need to have been a director to know that.)
Yes, other companies went bust too. But most of them for the same core reason as Imagine - their games were rubbish and nobody wanted them at any price.
The games industry has whined that "piracy is killing us" for the last 30 years. So how come it isn't dead yet? How can it be that, in fact, it's about 100 times the size, even though piracy is easier and more widespread than ever thanks to the internet and BitTorrent?
The answer is the same as it's always been - if you make games that people want to buy, they'll give you money. If you churn out crap and run your business badly, you'll go bust. And Imagine was, by its own admission, thoroughly guilty on both counts. It's embarrassing to see an industry figure so senior and supposedly wise still trying 25 years later to blame it all on little kids in playgrounds.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Stuart, you are wrong.] Look at this list to see just how many companies were wiped out: http://worldofspectrum.org/games/index.html
Piracy put the games industry in the doldrums for ages. Budget games that were not worth copying ruled. It was only with the introduction of copy proof game cartridge consoles (which did what Imagine had tried to do) that the industry took off again. Because once more there was a viable business model.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Piracy put the games industry in the doldrums for ages.
So many copies of Robocop did Ocean sell again?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Robocop was laden with all sorts of anti piracy protection including, with Robocop 3, a dongle!! Doing exactly what Imagine had been trying to do.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Bruce, it had Speedlock on it. Which was hacked about five seconds after it left the duplicators. Plus, you could tape it to a C90 easily. Yet it was still one of the biggest selling games on the Spectrum...
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
If I recall correctly, the Robocop 3 dongle was beaten before the game's official release too.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Bruce, you're talking complete cobblers and you know it. The documentary you're so keen to link to points out why times got harder in 1984:
"It's slowed down dramatically in the last three months... probably because there are a lot more software houses now producing goods than there were this time last year." - Imagine sales manager Sylvia Jones
Any chump can make money in the early days of a format, simply by getting product on shelves when people have nothing else to buy. But soon, other publishers flood onto the scene in pursuit of the easy money, and then the wheat is sorted from the chaff. You need good games and business skills to stay in profit against vastly increased competition, and Imagine had... Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser, and huge empty offices and fortunes being paid to tape plants to sit around doing nothing.
You keep ignoring all the facts that prove your argument is utter rubbish.
- The Speccy, despite being apparently crippled by piracy just 18 months into its life, survived as a High Street format for another seven years, longer than the SNES or the Mega Drive or the Amiga.
- despite a 30-year assault on the industry by the evil pirates, the industry has grown and grown and grown with every passing year, and now generates billions and billions of dollars. If piracy is killing games, it's doing an incredibly bad job.
- Ocean, which you yourself claim was "equally impacted by piracy" as Imagine, was still around and trading successfully a decade later. Other peers like Ultimate went on to become Rare and be bought by Microsoft for a quarter of a billion pounds. The only differences between them and Imagine were that they made better games and ran their companies more competently.
Elsewhere on your blog (http://bruceongames.com/2008/02/04/how-to-pirate-microsoft-xbox-360-games/) you tell us that pretty much every format on the market today is riddled with piracy - Xbox 360, PC, DS, PSP, the lot. One would imagine, then, that those formats would all be failing disastrously, and nobody was making any money on them. Whoops. Or are you telling us that the billions of pounds flowing into the games industry in 2008 - this week's MCV puts the software-market value for the UK ALONE at GBP107m for the last three weeks - is all coming from the PS3? Because I'm sure we'd all enjoy a chuckle.
GBP107m in three weeks, at the deadest time of the year, in the UK alone. Multiply that very roughly by 10 for the world market, then (conservatively) by 20 for a whole year, and you get GBP20 BILLION a year, on software alone, despite all the major formats being "killed" by piracy. The pirates really need to hire some better hitmen, wouldn't you say?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
I'm not entirely sure what this level of revisionism is supposed to achieve Bruce... I assume these pieces from The Fall Of Imagine article aren't gross misquotes?
"There were two main problems with Imagine," comments Everiss. "Firstly, the cost base became too high, too many staff and very expensive office accomodation. Secondly, development stopped producing product to sell, they expected the existing catalogue to sell for ever." ...
...In the meantime Everiss was fighting to pilot a ruddlerless ship. It was only towards the end that he became aware of the extent of the problem. "I'm not a signatory on the bank or anything," he said at the time, "but I've had a look at the financial records of the company and there has never been a VAT return, never a bank concillation, never a creditor's ledger control account, never any budgeting, never any cash-flow forecasting, no cost centres, not even an invoice authorisation procedure. Just no financial controls at all."
They seem to point clearly towards the fact that it wasn't piracy that was responsible for the demise of Imagine, but incredible folly. What changed in the 24 intervening years between the collapse of Imagine and today to warrant such massive levels of backtracking and misrepresentation of the facts?
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Trying to pretend that piracy is a victimless crime is patently absurd.] Just look at the way that bit torrent has dramatically reduced the number of boxed PC games now developed.
It has had the same effect on PSP where game software sales are a tiny fraction of what they would otherwise be.
Sinclair Spectrum game sales collapsed when tape to tape copying was "discovered". This really hammered the game development and publishing industry who tried everything they could to prevent it. Budget games was the only solution that worked until the consoles came along.
It was piracy that destroyed Imagine. Sure if we had all ridden bicycles and worked out of a tent we may have survived a little longer. But basically our income collapsed.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"It was piracy that destroyed Imagine. Sure if we had all ridden bicycles and worked out of a tent we may have survived a little longer."
Or made some good games, or only rented one big city-centre office instead of three. Or not sent people out to tell absurd lies to distributors - "Bandersnatch will have 25 things in the box, cost 40 quid and be out in six weeks". At the time Jones was telling those lies, even if Imagine hadn't gone down the toilet the game was months, probably years away.
Is the games industry dead, Bruce? Or does it get bigger every year, despite the fact that piracy gets easier and more widespread every year?
It's a pretty simple question.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
And when did anyone say "piracy is a victimless crime"? Nobody on here. Are you so desperate to shore up your position that you've resorted to refuting arguments nobody made? It seems so. As Oddbob notes, you condemned your future self out of your own mouth - Imagine was staggeringly badly run, and created no new games anyone wanted. That's why it went bust, and so many of its peers carried on successfully for years and decades.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Sinclair Spectrum game sales collapsed when tape to tape copying was "discovered".
Again, Robocop and the Ocean-Imagine era of 1987-91 do contradict you on this point...
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Oddbob,] the high cost base just accelerated Imagine's demise. The lack of new product was largely down to the concentration of resources on the megagames.
There is no revisionism. It is a matter of record that we tried to drop retail prices, that we wrote to all the magazines, that we went to 5 colour inlay cards. Why would we be putting our effort into doing all these things if it weren't that we were being very badly affected by piracy?
As I said earlier I was there as a board director and was involved in the decisions. I know exactly what happened and it is in that article.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"It is a matter of record that we tried to drop retail prices, that we wrote to all the magazines, that we went to 5 colour inlay cards. Why would we be putting our effort into doing all these things if it weren't that we were being very badly affected by piracy?"
Perhaps you'd have been better directing your efforts less at writing letters to Crash and making colourful inlay cards, and more at making some good games and sorting out the ongoing catastrophe that was - by YOUR OWN account - the state of the company's financial management?
It's odd that you were happy to acknowledge the company's many enormous failings at the time, but now want to blame it all on a nebulous bogeyman.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
It sounds to me like Imagine's problem was too-rapid expansion, and too little consolidation. The accounting problems outlined by Bruce, as quoted by Oddbob, seem to point to a mid-sized business being run like a back-bedroom operation.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Stuart you really have no idea what you are talking about. As I have said repeatedly, I was there. You only have, at best, third hand accounts.
If Ian Hetherington, David Lawson and Mark Butler all said that my article was rubbish then I might have a think about it.
Meanwhile it is the most accurate account of the demise of Imagine yet written.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
"The lack of new product was largely down to the concentration of resources on the megagames."
So you had nothing to sell because you were devoting all your time and money (that which wasn't being wasted on fast cars and empty offices and idle tape plants, at least) on absurd fantasy projects that didn't have one chance in a thousand of ever coming to fruition. You were relying on continuing sales of Ah Diddums and BC Bill funding the entire bloated, insanely-wasteful company for the months and years it would have taken to get Psyclapse and Bandersnatch finished, and then hoping that Speccy owners would fork out GBP40-GBP50 on a single game.
That's an accurate statement of Imagine's business plan for 1984-86, yes?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Bruce, could you address some of Stu's points about Imagine, like its running three city-centre offices and leaving two of them empty, paying to keep a duplication plant idle to prevent your competition releasing games for Christmas and talking up a product you claimed was going to have 25 things in the box and cost GBP40? Are these fair?
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
There was no idle tape plant.
[Just shows how completely misinformed you are.]
All we did is book our duplication early so as not to miss out on the then limited capacity.
Also I don't understand your obsession with cars. [Once again you are just regurgitating what you have read.] We only bought secondhand cars and they were on hire purchase. The monthly running costs including finance payments were not dissimilar to running a Ford Granada. In fact at the time probably cheaper because of the lack of depreciation.
[And if you continue to be offensive I will delete your posts.]
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Bruce, the tape plant was indeed not idle, but the report in Crash 12 implies that you duplicated vast swathes of your games to prevent others from doing so with theirs, and then the resulting flood of Imagine games after Christmas left you with huge amounts of stock you couldn't sell. Is this correct?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Offensive? All I'm looking for are some honest answers.
1. After 30 years of being "killed" by piracy, do you consider the GBP20bn-a-year videogames industry to be dead?
2. If not, how many more years of being killed will it take? You keep predicting that "eventually" piracy will stop the development of new games - since we're still on what looks a lot like a growth curve, when in your opinion will this event take place?
3. Do you consider that Imagine was prudently run, in terms of its finances?
4. Do you consider that games like Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser were of sufficiently high quality to compete profitably in the 1984 Spectrum market had there been no piracy? (World Of Spectrum shows over 1,000 commercial Speccy game releases in that year, including the likes of Jet Set Willy, Trashman, Beach Head, Technician Ted, Boulder Dash, Chuckie Egg, Pyjamarama, Sabre Wulf, Tornado Low Level, Tir Na Nog and many more classics.)
5. If piracy was to blame, why didn't you say so at the time instead of attributing Imagine's crash to bad management and bad planning?
Simple, polite questions that you keep dodging. Come on, Bruce, let's have some proper answers.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Peter,] what happened is that we largely sold the stock. However much of it was returned to us a faulty by the retailers who then refused to pay us. When we tested the games they were perfect, the retailers had refunded the customers without question. And of course the customers were returning the games because they had made copies.
Once tape copying took off loads of people took their game collections back for refund. Stores like W H Smith had a no quibble policy and gave them their money but then didn't pay us.
So piracy wasn't just not selling any new stock. It was not being paid for stock that had previously been legitimately sold.
I remember the huge mountain of games that came back from W H Smith, the largest retailer in those days.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
6. What is your honest opinion of the timescale that Psyclapse and Bandersnatch would have been released on, if ever?
7. What do you believe was their likely selling price in the event of release?
8. Do you believe that Imagine could realistically have covered its costs, and existing debts, until such a time by selling only its back catalogue, given that you've told us the company's resources were being devoted to those two titles at the expense of any other new games?
9. How accurate were your own statements at the time, in the Crash interview and the BBC documentary?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"I remember the huge mountain of games that came back from W H Smith, the largest retailer in those days."
I sympathise, but this must've been happening to other games companies too. Why did Imagine go to the wall when so many others didn't?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Hmm, I'm suspicious, especially given this, also from Crash 12:
This was a principal reason behind the strange move to lower the price of Imagine software. It also backfired because they had flooded the shops with non-selling tapes, and then expected everyone to like the fact that the tapes would have to be sold at a price lower than the wholesale price the shopkeepers had bought the tapes for in the first place.
You may have just been on the receiving end of a revolt rather than widespread piracy. And again, why didn't this affect Ocean, Domark, Elite, US Gold and Gremlin to a similar level?
(personally, I think that if you hadn't decided to develop a risky system that would cost twice your profits in 1983 with no real idea of the demand for the megagames, you would have been around for a fair few years, piracy notwithstanding...)
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
[Stuart you are being disingenuous.]
1) The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product. If people can get games for free then they will. Hence the demise of boxed PC games when bit torrents came along. This is irrefutable and you are in denial continuing to try to imply that piracy is victimless.
2) There is a continuous war between the pirated and the publishers. The ultimate solution is server based games. This is probably where most gaming will be.
3) Imagine was run sensibly, not prudently. For most of it's life it had rapidly increasing turnover and income in excess of it's outgoings. When the income suddenly stopped due to piracy we were in trouble.
4) Game quality is subjective. We published games, people bought them. Some games we published were, very obviously, better than others.
5) We did. I refer you once again to the letter that we sent to every magazine.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
10. How accurate is this account of events at the time of the collapse?
http://nvg.ntnu.no... imagine_crash0185.htm
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
So "I've had a look at the financial records of the company and there has never been a VAT return, never a bank concillation, never a creditor's ledger control account, never any budgeting, never any cash-flow forecasting, no cost centres, not even an invoice authorisation procedure. Just no financial controls at all," is your idea of being run "sensibly"?
Wow.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product... This is irrefutable and you are in denial continuing to try to imply that piracy is victimless."
Bruce, if you think the games industry is not currently "successful" then you appear to be the one in denial. Every format currently available is easily pirateable, and yet game software still sells to the tune of GBP20bn a year. Man, I'd love to fail that badly.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Stuart,] Firstly it was piracy that led to the demise of Imagine. Without piracy it would probably still be here, there were some good people in the company who have gone on to have successful careers in the industry.
The situation at Imagine was worse than at the other publishers:
1) Because we were the biggest, so the most exposed.
2) We had expanded very quickly on a small capital base.
3) Our overhead base was large. We had a larger workforce than any other publisher and we had expensive premises.
4) What financial resources we had were going into the megagames.
5) Our development talent was going mainly into the megagames.
1) to 5) are not the reason for the demise of Imagine. They are merely factors that made the piracy bite harder.
[As I have said repeatedly I was there at the highest level in the company. You, most definitely, were not. Yet you persist in thinking that you know better than me what happened.]
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Stuart you obviously know little about games.] When a format is piratable at massive inconvenience to the pirate then the incidence of piracy is low. As now on PS3, Wii and 360.
It is when piracy is so easy that any idiot can do it that we have the problem. As in 8 bit tape to tape, PSX disk burning and PC bit torrents. All three of these have decimated sales and damaged the industry.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
No, Bruce - as I've said, I persist in believing what you said at the time. Namely, that the company was quite stupefyingly badly run, had no financial planning, was spending all its money on games which would never come out, and had nothing of even remotely acceptable quality to sell in the meantime.
And why wouldn't I believe those things? After all, you were there, and you should know.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
According to the Crash article, Psylapse was advertised in the press and expensive box art was commissioned at a time when it still only existed on paper. Is this true?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"It is when piracy is so easy that any idiot can do it that we have the problem."
Ah, right. That would explain the massive failure of the DS, and the Playstation before it, and the Spectrum before that.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Incidentally, I've just seen the weather forecast on telly, and it's going to rain later this afternoon. Apparently piracy is to blame.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Does anyone still have the liquidators' report from Imagine? This would offer an excellent independent assessment of what went wrong, carried out by impartial professionals.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Stuart, just because the book keeping was not what it should have been does not mean that other departments had the same problem.
Ian, it is standard practice to create the marketing material and advertise a game to create a demand. If publishers waited till a game was finished before they did this there would be no industry.
I am answering no more here. I have better things to do with my time. What is in that article is an accurate account of events at the time. From the position of someone who was actually there.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
The DS, the most easily pirated format of them all, is currently outselling just about everything, probably including bread. I'm a bit confused by that.
What's fun here is it's an argument between 1984 Bruce, and 2008 Bruce.
2008 Bruce, while we all know that liking a game is subjective, we also know that far fewer people like really rubbish games, than those that like really good games. So, considering this, do you think if Imagine had been releasing really good games they would have better survived the brutal attacks of the mighty pirates?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"I am answering no more here."
Yeah, the ground under your argument IS getting a little sticky, isn't it? You can repeat "piracy is what killed Imagine" as many times as you like, but it won't make it any more true.
It didn't kill any of the other big Speccy companies. It didn't kill the Speccy itself, or its magazines. It hasn't killed the games industry as a whole, which has enjoyed absolutely spectacular growth and is now bigger than music and movies and Communism and everything. Piracy has always been with us, is with us now, and will always be with us. Other publishers manage to do very well despite it. Imagine was disastrously badly run and had no marketable product, and therefore collapsed. That's not piracy, that's business. The end.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"All three of these have decimated sales and damaged the industry."
So all of this is over a 10% fall in sales?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Stuart you obviously know little about games. When a format is piratable at massive inconvenience to the pirate then the incidence of piracy is low. As now on PS3, Wii and 360."
Conveniently, MCV have just published the UK sales figures for March. Let's have a look at how sales are doing when measured against ease of piracy:
FULL PRICE SOFTWARE BY FORMAT
------------------------
360 (fairly easy to pirate) - 23.1%
Wii (quite hard to pirate) - 18.5%
PC (very very easy) - 17.1%
DS (very very easy) - 16.7%
PS3 (pretty hard) - 16.4%
PSP (definitely the hardest) - 4.2%
BUDGET PRICE BY FORMAT
------------------
DS (easy) - 30.6%
PC (easy) - 21%
Wii (medium) - 16.7%
PS2 (medium) - 12.3%
PSP (hard) - 7.3%
360 (hard) - 6.2%
Well, that's odd. By and large, it's the vastly-easiest-to-pirate DS and PC (requiring no hardware or firmware modifications whatsoever) that are selling the most games, and the much-more-difficult-to-pirate PSP (which requires all sorts of specialised peripherals and scary messing with the firmware) is trailing in last, miles behind everything else. How very strange.
Bruce? Bruce?
Oh, you've gone.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
NUMBER OF FORMAT-EXCLUSIVE GAMES IN ALL-FORMATS TOP 50, MARCH 2008:
DS: 8 (positions 3, 13, 15, 23, 25, 28, 36, 47, 49)
Wii: 4 (positions 9, 14, 17, 40)
360: 2 (positions 18, 48)
PS3: 2 (positions 5, 46)
PC: 1 (position 22)
Another savage beating for the easy-to-pirate DS at the hands of those evil software thieves, there.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
[Stuart, you obviously know little about games. You are spending too much time as a keyboard warrior.]
The PSP is not definitely the hardest to pirate. You just download the bit torrent onto a memory card. This is why PSP games sell so badly. You are just plain wrong. Again.
The DS isn't very, very easy because you have to go out and buy a special copying attachment and most owners haven't got this yet. Once again you are wrong.
[All this is covered in earlier articles on this blog, which I suggest that you read. Then you might learn something about the game industry.]
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Hold on, surely the PSP and the DS are much of a muchness in the piracy stakes, both requiring the purchase of a dubious peripheral that isn't available in the shops?
Also, Bruce, do you have a copy of the liquidators' report? That should settle the argument for once and for all.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Stuart, you obviously know little about games. You are spending too much time as a keyboard warrior.
The PSP is not definitely the hardest to pirate. You just download the bit torrent onto a memory card. This is why PSP games sell so badly. You are just plain wrong. Again."
Bruce: a PSP will NOT run "bit torrents" from a memory card unless it has first been modified with custom firmware. In order to do this, you must first procure a specialised "Pandora" battery, and use it in conjunction with software on a specially-modified memory stick in order to flash the custom firmware. This is an extremely daunting task for anyone not already well-versed in hacking, and runs the risk of "bricking" the PSP, rendering it unable to play any games, pirated or otherwise. I'm afraid you're the one who is "plain wrong" on this matter.
As for my knowing "little about games" - you're aware that I've been a professional videogames journalist for almost 20 years, and was also Development Manager at Sensible Software during their most successful period in the mid-90s, yes? All you have to do to discover said fact is click on my name on any of my comments.
Because, y'know, otherwise you might look a bit silly.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Ian: as you know, the R4 DS "flash cart" is easily available from those sinister semi-legal pirate-enablers at Amazon.co.uk. And it requires no modification to the DS hardware or firmware, needing simply to be plugged in, unlike PSP modding which is far more complex and convoluted. (After the modification is performed the two are equally easy, but that's a very big "after".)
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
My mother pirates games on her DS. It's not a difficult task by any means.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
The PSP doesn't require any dubious peripheral. Just a standard Sony card writer/reader on your PC. I have one that accepts lots of different memory cards.
PSP owners very widely use their machines as media players. They download all sorts of content as bit torrents. Films especially. So downloading games has been very common for PSP owners for some time. Hence the very poor sales of PSP games.
The demographic of DS owners is a lot less techie. Brain training etc saw to that. So they are vastly less likely to pirate. And you do need to buy a deicated piracy device to do it. Also these devices have only been commonly available relatively recently so their full impact is yet to be felt.
And Stuart's format exclusive games list supports what I have said.
That now is really enough from me.
The liquidators report, which I haven't seen, will presumably say that income stopped and outgoings continued.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Bruce, you're becoming delusional. An unmodded PSP will run movie files, which are unprotected, but it will NOT run pirated PSP games. To do so requires a complex technical process and specialised hardware in the shape of the "Pandora" or "Jigkick" battery.
Your comments on the levels of DS piracy, and the availability of pirating devices for it, are so ill-informed and spectacularly wrong as to be laughable, and merit no retort, because it's becoming apparent that you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
I'd just like to pop in and say that I very much enjoyed reading this thread.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
Hacking a fat PSP doesn't need a Pandora battery - the earlier firmwares were pretty easy to mod once people starting making the n00b-proof programs. After the later firmwares it was a little more tricky but I'd imagine the majority of PSPs are easily hackable.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Interestingly, there was a Speccy megagame of exactly the type Mr Everiss describes: it came out at Christmas 1985 with a dongle that looked like a joystick interface and included a 16K ROM to support the 64K-only game and provide built-in tape alignment testing, plus a joystick socket.
The dongle took over the Speccy and booted the main game from tape as an extremely fast headerless loader. You didn't have to bother with tape-to-tape to copy the game; you could freely back it up to tape or Microdrive from the options screen, because even if you could duplicate the file it was useless without the other bits of the game in the dongle ROM.
The game, a complicated fantasy thing, also packed extras in the striking box such as a glossy map and a specially commissioned novel that supplied important clues.
In practical terms, the only difference between this megagame and the Imagine model was that the game sold for GBP15, not GBP30 or GBP40.
The game was Shadow of the Unicorn by much-loved veteran software house Mikrogen, who'd seen huge success with their Wally Week games such as Everyone's a Wally and Automania (which, incidentally, was the first Speccy game with an anti-piracy fast loader. It was famously unreliable). The dongle even had a special name, the Mikro-Plus. Given the tech of the time, a Mikro-Plus game was literally unpirateable. Shadow of the Unicorn was to be the first of a series of megagames from the company; already underway were popular cartoon licence Battle of the Planets and hotly anticipated Wally sequel Three Weeks in Paradise.
http://crashonline.org.uk/19/mkplus.htm
Shadow of the Unicorn destroyed Mikrogen. Utterly destroyed them. Because nobody bought the game, because it was a rubbish cross between a terrible, terrible Lords of Midnight rip-off and a terrible, terrible Tir Na Nog clone (both of which games, obviously, had come out earlier without the need for special hardware). According to Crash, the company sank at least GBP130,000 into the dongle, ordering an initial 25,000 units: http://crashonline.org.uk/20/unicorn.htm . According to Sinclair User, they needed to sell 40,000 to break even, but only managed about a quarter of that by selling copies to me and 10,999 other idiots: http://sincuser.f9.co.uk/046/news.htm . The catastrophe caused the breakup of the vintage publisher's original team and the company lost both an MD and a founding programmer.
Mikrogen struggled along for another 18 months. Strangely enough, both Battle of the Planets and Three Weeks in Paradise were rushed out as normal, non-Plus games, apparently losing nothing at all in the conversion. (To be fair, there was a slightly bigger Three Weeks for the Speccy 128K, but there's no info on whether that was the original Mikro-Plus version undongled or the 48K game with a section added later to qualify as a 128K full-pricer; my instinct is the latter, especially as the rubbish vector shooter Battle of the Planets was unchanged from the Plus-only previews.)
Thanks to emulation, you can now play the totally unpirateable non-selling company-ruining terrible game, dongle and all: http://worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004424 .
You might also be interested to see Gift From the Gods ( http://worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002041 ) which is what Bandersnatch became after Imagine collapsed and lead Bandersnatch programmer John Gibson formed gun-for-hire favourites Denton Designs ( http://sincuser.f9.co.uk/040/htsquad.htm ). Notoriously dodgy Imagine reboot Finchspeed tried to make off with the official rights and reportedly there was a completed QL conversion that nobody's ever seen in any form, plus a 16-bit remix from Psygnosis renamed Brattacas ( http://brataccas.com/Page28.cfm and http://brataccas.net/?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=35 ). Psyclapse, of course, never existed except as an ad.
One final thing: Mr Everiss's spirited defence of exactly the opposite of what he said at the time of Imagine's collapse might be caused by a confusion of terms. The posters here are clearly referring to casual ("playground") piracy, which the facts comprehensively prove since the invention of consumer computers contribute to a format's *success* with endless examples from the Apple II through the Speccy through the Playstation to the Nintendo DS and Microsoft Windows.
It's possible Mr Everiss is referring to *commercial* piracy, which was one of the reasons Imagine gave for their collapse ( http://users.globalnet.co.uk/~jg27paw4/yr07/yr07_03.htm#Imagine ), though exasperatingly in the vaguest possible terms: "Financial Director Ian Hetherington... claims that 300,000-400,000 pirated tapes were uncovered not long ago. (Could this be the first official mention of the oft-rumoured 'find' of bootlegs in a London warehouse back in January? Ed)" Does anyone have any solid info about this?
Incidentally, the Robocop 3 dongle was a zero-day crack and, er, prevented the game working at all on certain Amigas: http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=103166&postcount=6 and http://oceanexp.proboards44.com/v45index.cgi?board=memory&action=display&thread=209&page=2 . Ocean rapidly undongled the game for re-release and never dongled again.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
I'm afraid there is no way Imagine would be running today. Even Ocean couldn't survive into the PS2 era.
Imagine believed their own hype. After some initially good games they released utter tripe and messed around with retailers by changing prices.
While it is true that tape to tape piracy impacted Spectrum software from 1986 onwards, to blame the demise of Imagine on this is pure comedy gold.
Ocean, US Gold, Domark, Codemasters and countless other software houses survived. The difference was that they didn't base their entire operation on hype.
I was in the industry at the time, everyone knew what was going on at Imagine. Hiring in flash cars, hype, and image rather than produce games that were any good.
The downfall of Imagine was Imagine. Piracy almost certainly did hit the bottom line as it did for the rest of us but I'm afraid that if the margins were that poor at Imagine that the reduction in sales alone led to the companies collapse then things must have been in a poor state. As for the GBP50 games, who were Imagine kidding exactly?
I'd also like to add that it is not possible to run pirated software on a PSP without a modification to the firmware inside the console. So it's not an "easy" console to pirate games for.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"The PSP is not definitely the hardest to pirate. You just download the bit torrent onto a memory card. This is why PSP games sell so badly. You are just plain wrong. Again.
"
Bruce mate, you're simply wrong on this one. Just plain 100% wrong. In fact if you get a new shop bought PSP Slim and can run a pirate game simply by copying an ISO to a memory card, I'll buy you the damn thing.
Even with launch PSPs they would have to have never used a firmware update, which pretty much means today that they've never played a game or used a UMD movie, because almost all of them have forced upgrades in order to play/watch. So for a PSP to be truly "easy" to pirate on you'd have to have owned it for at least 2 years and never turned it on. And even then it's by no means as easy as "Copy a game to a memory card".
--
"Hacking a fat PSP doesn't need a Pandora battery - the earlier firmwares were pretty easy to mod once people starting making the n00b-proof programs. After the later firmwares it was a little more tricky but I'd imagine the majority of PSPs are easily hackable."
Absolutely, by you can't copy a game to a memory card and expect it to work unless you have a Japanese launch PSP still running firmware 1.00, and even then it won't run remotely recent games without upgrades to the firmware you can only find on websites of at least medium repute.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
As a few people seem to be interested in the Imagine liquidators' report, it's quite possibly available here:
http://companieshouse.gov.uk/WebCHeck/fastrack/
Irritatingly, the idiot site uses dynamic URLs so a straightforward link isn't possible, and Imagine's company number is surprisingly elusive -- it's not on any of the worldofspectrum.org ads or inlay scans, for example -- but from examining the likely suspects it has to be
Imagine Software Ltd: company number 01720850
(The obvious one, Imagine Software 1984 Ltd, is in fact the later Ocean incarnation.)
The info page says the papers have been archived so you have to ring up, but of course they're now closed for the weekend.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
Another example of megagames sinking a company is Micro Power and Doctor Who and the Mines Of Terror. Yuo can read the Wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Power
In essence, Mines Of Terror is often cited as the gane that sank Micro Power because it cost so much to develop and manufacture, and the only copy of the game they ever sold was to my family.
You can check it - they made bigger and bigger games and sold fewer and fewer copies - a combination of development time and niche markets. It's got nothign to do with piracy; if you make niche products you have to shoulder the responsibility of the corresponding market size.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
I've ordered a copy of the final creditors' meeting report, which was the nearest thing they could find. Stand by!
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"1) The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product. If people can get games for free then they will. Hence the demise of boxed PC games when bit torrents came along. This is irrefutable and you are in denial continuing to try to imply that piracy is victimless."
I thought the only boxed PC games that were suffering were samey ego shooters with system requirements that will theoretically exist in three years.
At any rate, product has never been and will never be pirate proof, yet the industry continues.
Personally, I'd attribute any sales slump to people refusing to pay money to be harrassed by their software's "protection", as that's why I stopped purchasing.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
I would be fascinated to see the final creditor's meeting report. In it's entirety, not just edited highlights. I was not involved in the receivership process so have no idea what went on.
Obviously Imagine went bust because outgoings exceeded incomings. There were many factors that contributed to this, but the main one was the collapse in sales when tape to tape home piracy and large scale commercial piracy took off.
As I said in my article we tried many different strategies to counter this piracy, one of which was the megagemes. The megames were purely created as an anti piracy measure. If there had been no piracy we would not even have thought of the idea and would have continued churning out tape products.
Now different commentators may give different weight to the different factors in Imagine's demise.
Here are some:
1) Variable product quality.
2) Excessive premises costs.
3) Large staff overheads.
4) Flashy cars. (Very tabloid but in reality not a vast overhead)
5) Very high level of return from retail and consequent non payment of their accounts.
You can't say poor management decisions without saying what those decisions were.
However as I have pointed out before I was there, in charge of sales and marketing. And I saw the sales collapse once the copying genie was out of the bottle. The megagames were the last throw of the dice in order to beat the scourge.
The game industry survived for a while on the back of mainly budget games that were so cheap as not to be worth copying. Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
The megames were purely created as an anti piracy measure.
Surely the point of the megagames was to use the extra memory and graphics capability of the add-on to stretch the boundaries of gaming?
'Modestly, Bruce Everiss was heard to say that "The Mega- games will make all other products obsolete overnight ..."'
Were you lying then, and it was all about piracy? That Bandersnatch and Psyclapse wouldn't have been as good as what eventually became Frankie Goes To Hollywood after all?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
A little big more digging reveals these gems from Crash 7:
We then called Bruce Everiss and the confusion began to clear. When asked what was happening at Imagine Bruce replied shortly, ‘The company is up shit street. There has been no proper financial control. Not even a VAT return has been done.'
Bruce Everiss was left to find jobs for 60 people. ‘It makes me sick,' he said to CRASH, to think that the people who have worked so hard to make the wealth of Imagine have been left high and dry while the directors of the company have stripped it bare and got away scot free. They did everything to line their own pockets.'
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
What I said, in marketing mode, is not incompatible with the main reason for the megagames being anti piracy.
Accusing me of lying is out of order.
Obviously the idea was that the megagames would be vastly better than tape games. They had to be to justify the hefty premium. But this was not the reason behind their creation. That was anti piracy, pure and simple. I know because I was involved in the discussions leading to their creation. Initially we looked at putting a Z80 maths co processor in a dongle and using it to write more powerful code. This approach had the disadvantage of not being game specific.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Your quote from Crash 7 has no relevance to this discussion. It is just me venting my anger at the way my co directors were behaving.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Apologies for the lying accusation; it just seems a complete change from the 1983/4 rationalisation of the megagames. But I take issue with Crash 7 not having any relevance - the directors were trying to set up new companies, sneak away with the company's assets and mislead other companies into signing worthless deals to buy them a little more time. Which suggests that piracy was not the main reason that Imagine fell, but instead inexperience and negligence on the part of the directors played a major part...
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
On a lighter note, is there any chance the All-Formats Computer Fairs could return? They were great fun. I bought my first printer from one such event, at the Birmingham Motorcycle Museum.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along."
Which consoles are we talking about here? I'm confused, because by common consensus the console that caused the explosion in the UK industry (and most other places) was the Playstation, and the Playstation was one of the easiest consoles to pirate games on ever - certainly many, many times easier than any console before it, because it ran games off CD.
Throughout the entire history of gaming, "easy to pirate" = "huge success". It's almost impressive how flatly you continue to ignore/deny this empirical, astonishingly obvious fact.
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
[Now Stuart you make even less sense.]
Easy to pirate = huge success is the sort of thing game pirates say when they try and make out that their thieving is a victimless crime.
[I have said this before but you obviously weren't paying attention.] I was at Codemasters when they laid off 20% of their workforce directly as a result of Playstation piracy. It was not rubbish games, it was not flash cars, it was piracy. At the beginning of Playstation there was no piracy because burners were too expensive and chipping hadn't been worked out. So we prospered. But once the burner/chipping genie was out of it's bottle sales collapsed.
Once again I was there and I saw it happen. It affected many developers and publishers incredibly badly. Lots and lots of development staff got laid off throughout the industry and couldn't find jobs as nobody was hiring.
[What you don't seem to realise is that some] people have to pay for the game to pay the wages of the people that made it. When the vast majority are buying pirated games then there is no money to pay the wages. That is why Playstation development came to an abrupt halt and Playstation 2 development didn't. Playstation 2 wasn't pirated in the same way.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along."
So set us straight - exactly when was this?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Granted I'm not in Europe, so things could have gone differently over there, but I don't recall Playstation development coming to an abrupt end. It had one of the longest tails after the launch of a new generation of consoles that I've ever seen.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
[9572AD you ought to look at your facts before making statements like this.] PSX was launched in Japan in Dec 1994 and remained in production (as PS1) till March 2006.
Game releases slowed in 1999.
It slowed a real big lot in 2000.
And after that was a trickle, when the console still had 5 year's production. Considering the 2 year lead time to make most games it is very clear that the tap was turned off in 1998. There was no tail.
As I said before I was there, involved in the meetings and discussions. Piracy made continuing development uneconomic.
Here is the release list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_PlayStation_games
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Goodness. Damn those pirates for causing PS1 releases to slow in 1999 and drop off in 2000. It's the only possible explanation.
After all, it's definitely not like the Playstation 2 was announced in early 1999 and released in 2000 or anything, meaning that with "the 2 year lead time to make most games" its effect would start taking place from March '99 onwards.
[SUB: PLEASE CHECK]
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
BRUCE:
"Game releases slowed in 1999.
It slowed a real big lot in 2000."
TRUTH (according to your own link):
1994 - 15 PS1 games released
1995 - 65
1996 - 129
1997 - 89
1998 - 97
1999 - 100
2000 - 78
2001 - 33
2002 - 52
2003 - 29
In other words, when you say game releases "slowed" in 1999, what you actually meant was "increased for the second year in succession". In 2000, by which time the PS2 was already out, it saw just 19 fewer releases than i 1998 when the PS2 was just a rumour.
Incidentally, the PS1 was easily pirateable from mid-1995 - I know this because I still have the credit card statement showing when I got CEX to do mine. Yet in 1996, releases almost doubled. Conversely, the harder-to-mod PSone came out in 2000. The next year, releases dropped by more than half, the biggest year-on-year fall in the format's entire history. By 2002, when the PSone was also cracked, releases - incredibly - almost doubled, at a time when the Playstation was already seven years old.
Honestly, Bruce, you have to stop making this so easy for us. The more flat-out bollocks you talk - helpfully GIVING US THE LINKS THAT PROVE IT'S BOLLOCKS - the bigger a hole you're digging for yourself and your deluded piracy-is-the-bogeyman horror fantasy.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
It's not true to say all games have a 2 year lead either, games can be cancelled while in dev, a fall in 2000 does not mean everyone gave up in 1998. If they gave up in 1998 they would have cancelled the games then rather than let them spend 2 years in dev.
A good proportion of games, especially end of console life game take a lot less than 2 years too. The EA Sports games clearly don't individually have a 2 year dev period, neither did the "Hugo" and "Action man" games that obviously dominate a format as the average game buying age skews downward.
Still no work on your success with putting and ISO of say, "Flatout : Head on" on the memcard of an unmodded retail PSP then? Or were we sweeping that one under the carpet?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Presumably, also, in this "piracy=death" world of yours, any console that was much less pirateable than its peers would naturally find itself the focus of development, as publishers recoiled from the easily-copied formats to the haven of the "safe" machines.
Would you agree, then, that that's the reason the almost-pirate-proof N64 and Gamecube so effectively crushed their easily-pirated competitors the PS1, Saturn, PS2 and Xbox?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Actually Stuart there was a gap between giving up on PSX/PS1 because of piracy and waiting for the PS2 base to be big enough to be worth releasing games into.
I think our last big PSX release was TOCA WDC in 2000 which sold badly despite 10/10 scores. It was really zapped by piracy. We were shocked at the time by just how little it sold.
IIRC our first PS2 release was Race Driver in 2002.
We survived (and had to make 20% of the workforce redundant) in the two year gap mainly on PC games, most notably Operation Flashpoint which went to number one in every country with a chart. We put a massive amount of effort into anti piracy on this game. Our PC games without anti piracy, like Severance, sold very little. In fact the developer of Severence went bust as a result of this piracy despite it being an immensely popular game. It is just that most people just thieved it.
[As I keep saying I was there. I was in the meetings. You were not. Piracy is not victimless like you think. When it gets a strong hold it rips the heart out of development.]
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Tell me Stuart, do you play pirated games?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Oh and why don't you concede that 9572AD was wrong, even by your own figures? He said PSX had one of the longest tails he had seen when in fact it had no tail at all. Because piracy made it not worth developing for. As your list of figures proves.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
You "being there in the meetings" proves absolutely nothing, Bruce, except perhaps that they were meetings of clueless directors like the ones who ran Imagine.
You say "TOCA WDC was really zapped by piracy" as if you saying so makes it a fact, but there's not one shred of proof for that assertion. Hundreds of critically-adored games sell poorly because reviewers love them but the FIFA-and-Sims-buying public doesn't. (Hello Rez!) Others are released at unfortunate times in terms of competing releases - perhaps in 2000 TOCA was eclipsed by your own Colin McRae Rally 2, for example, a very similar but hugely better game. Or just possibly it could have been the tiny, trifling matter of something called Gran Turismo 2, released in December 1999.
And NOT ONE PERSON ON THIS ENTIRE THREAD has EVER said "piracy is victimless", Bruce, so please shut up about it. I know it's easier to fight against the arguments you WISH people had made rather than the ones they actually DID make, but it doesn't win you any debates.
"Severence went bust as a result of this piracy despite it being an immensely popular game"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that the same Severance that got an almost-unprecedented (only one game in the magazine's entire 15-year history has ever scored lower) 2/10 review mark in Edge? Or a different Severance?
I'm a videogame journalist who's also been writing features about piracy for 20 years, so of course I play pirated games sometimes. It's my job. But you're welcome to send ELSPA round to see my 500+ ORIGINAL Playstation 1 games, 300+ ORIGINAL Playstation 2 games, etc etc.
Now that I've answered all of your questions, how about you catch us up on all the ones of mine and everyone else that you've ignored or, in some cases, deleted?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Oh and why don't you concede that 9572AD was wrong, even by your own figures? He said PSX had one of the longest tails he had seen when in fact it had no tail at all."
They're not MY figures, Bruce, they're the ones YOU linked to. And what on Earth are you talking about? PS1 releases DOUBLED in 2002, an incredible SEVEN YEARS after the machine was released. No platform since the Spectrum has seen such a long tail. Until, perhaps, the massively-pirated PS2.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
And here is the reality of PSP piracy: http://pspfanboy.com/2008/04/10/psp-software-holds-no-place-on-2007-bestseller-list/
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
[Stuart you are deluded.]
When there is mass piracy of a game it hits publisher income and curtails development. This is simple logic. Where else is the money going to come from?
I think you do yourself no favours by calling people like Nick Wheelwright and Johhn Hemingway clueless. [I would rather work in a business run by them than a business run by you. As would most people.]
[Continually saying you are a journalist also means that you base everything on second or third hand information. You are only told what people want to tell you.]
Choosing the Edge score for Severance is typical of how you twist arguments. This score was a well known abberation of Edge proving that they were Edge. A far fairer view might be to go to game rankings where 30 reviews gave it an average of 76%. Why didn't you choose PC Game World? They gave it 95%. http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages4/370441.asp
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
I have only refused to allow posts that were excessively defamatory or profane [, including one of yours].
[As anybody with a brain can see I have allowed both sides of the argument here.] I have allowed both sides of the argument here as anyone can see. [To imply that I haven't is being disingenuous. Just like your Edge score.]
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Because nobody reads PC Games World or cares about anything they say.
We're clearly wasting our time here, Bruce, because you refuse to answer anyone who proves you wrong. Your own figures PROVE that 9572AD was right - the PS1 had almost as many new releases SEVEN YEARS after release as it did in its first full year. Yet astonishingly you claim that the plain black-and-white figures somehow prove your claim that it had no tail.
You ignore the fact that just maybe competing against Gran Turismo 2 had a detrimental effect on the sales of TOCA WDC, a game that's almost exactly the same but half as good. After all, *GT2 was just as easy to pirate as TOCA*, yet it sold millions and millions at the exact same time your game was stiffing. So how can piracy possibly be the reason?
You ignore the fact that throughout history, the formats which are hardest to pirate are the ones that lose each generation. N64, Gamecube, PSP, PS3, the list is comprehensive. Easy-to-pirate formats (Spectrum, Playstation, DS) are the ones which sell vast truckloads of both hardware and software. Absolute proven FACT.
You ignore the universally-acknowledged fact that PSP sales are driven not by games but by the machine's other abilities, eg the superb Remote Play and being able to watch downloaded movies without any modification.
You insist on making flatly, empirically wrong statements such as your claim that it's possible to play pirated games on an unmodified PSP. Dudley's even offered to buy you a free PSP if you can prove that one, but you ignore him.
You claim that Imagine was run "sensibly" despite the obvious facts and YOUR OWN QUOTES attacking the directors for absolutely criminal financial irresponsibility.
It's hard, in fact, to find a SINGLE claim you've made in this entire thread that's supported by the facts. Including your repeated assertions that you weren't going to post any more.
"I would rather work in a business run by them than a business run by you."
Don't lose any sleep over that one, Bruce. If I should ever find myself running a software publisher, you won't be getting a call.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
[Blimey, what a load of rubbish.]
1) The first full year of releases is very slow for a variety of technical reasons [that you would understand if you had the experience]. Everyone can see from your list of figure exactly what happened to the PSX tail. Especially as the platform remained in production till 2006.
2) TOCA WDC was not zapped by Gran Turismo 2. [You just made this up with zero evidence.] Sales of our racing games earlier in the life of PSX had not been affected by other racing games. [Also saying that it was almost exactly the same game shows how little you know.] The only thing in common was the motor racing. TOCA had a very strong story line and deformable cars just for starters.
3) [You thing about hard to pirate platforms being the most successful is pure rubbish.] The hardest platform to pirate this generation is probably the Wii, yet it sells nearly as much as the other two put together. And the Dreamcast was easier to pirate than the Playstation, yet lost.
4) The PSP is well zapped by piracy as I have said all along. [Something you seem to be in denial of. Anyone reading this will know that I am right and you are wrong.] http://www.pspfanboy.com/2008/04/10/psp-software-holds-no-place-on-2007-bestseller-list/
[5) You are never, ever going to find yourself running a software publisher. Everyone will agree to this one!]
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
I have been talking to someone who worked on the megagames at Imagine (not a director) and he reckons that the Marshall Cavendish contract was the biggest culprit for the bankrupcy. And that piracy was a contributor.
Just to give you another perspective.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
1. Oh, of course it is. But show me one other console platform that had almost as many releases in year 7 as year 1. Just one.
2. Actually, Bruce, my evidence is Gran Turismo 2's TEN MILLION SALES, despite being out at almost exactly the same time as TOCA WDC. And if you don't think they're almost exactly the same thing, then that proves just how out of touch you are with game buyers. People have limited amounts of money to spend on GBP40 games. If they're going to buy two, they're not going to buy two technical driving simulators set largely on sterile real-world tracks. If you think a crappy story mode makes these two near-identical games suddenly become chalk and cheese then you're a far, far bigger fool than I ever imagined, which is really saying something.
TEN MILLION SALES, Bruce. At a time when the PS1 was apparently dead because of piracy. TEN MILLION SALES of a game that was every bit as easy to pirate as your flop. When are you going to wake up and smell reality?
3. I'm happy to accept that the Wii is a phenomenon which shatters many previously-solid rules about the games biz. But you can't wriggle out of the evidence of the N64, Gamecube, PS1, PS2, Xbox, DS and all the rest.
4. That link is utterly worthless. It shows no PSP-EXCLUSIVE games in the list, but plenty that came out on the PSP as well as other formats. It also shows lots of DS-exclusive games in the upper reaches of the chart, despite the fact that the DS is FAR EASIER TO PIRATE ON THAN THE PSP. Your selective blindness is stunning.
5. And yet I've already been Development Manager of a game developer better and more successful in its market than anyone you ever worked for. I was involved in the production of three games (writing most of one of them myself), and every one of them went to No.1 in the All Formats charts. That's a 100% record of success by any measure, Bruce. If only you could say the same.
6. TEN MILLION SALES, Bruce. At the exact same time your game died on its arse, an almost-identical one from another publisher sold TEN MILLION copies. Damn that piracy making you fail, eh?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Would that be the Marshall Cavendish contract that Imagine didn't produce the games for? So they wanted their money back? I mean, really, everything we've brought up in the past week has shown Imagine to have been something of a shambles, and I haven't yet brought up the Studio Sting/Software Projects stuff yet, so I still don't see why you cling to piracy so much in their case when it appears that almost everything that could go wrong at Imagine did go wrong...
(Post not deleted by Bruce.)
Sure, the PSP is "zapped by piracy" but not even remotely on the same scale as the thriving DS. There's far, far less to pirate for one thing - but before you seize on that statement, lets take a look at the PSP from inception to now.
You could write a book on just how badly Sony handled the handheld market (please, don't ask me to say that whilst drunk) leading to the PSP floundering around.
On paper, the PSP looks like the infinitely superior console - and indeed it is *on a technical level*. A series of gross PR mistakes (All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP being an especially horrific misjudgement), making the console "not especially handheld" and a lack of compelling killer apps announced from launch pretty much put the nails in the coffin before anyone had even considered hacking the beast, but there's a far more compelling reason if you sit back and think about the shape of the market today.
On one hand you could claim that Nintendo already owned the market, but given that the DS has a far broader appeal than the Gameboy range ever had - virtually everyone I've met in the past couple of years has not just one DS but a number of them in the house, then clearly there was still a lot of ground to be gained.
Sony aimed head first at a handheld media centre and, oh how I hate this phrase, "hardcore" gaming market instead of making the primary focus on accessibility,price and opening the market up to the casual spectrum. And, I would wager, there lies the root of the PSP's floundering as Nintendo countered with a move the industry needed to expand.
A mistake, cockiness or just short sighted? We'll doubtless never know but they targeted a small subset of the market. Nintendo aimed to bring everyone into gaming at an affordable price, something that's also paid off in droves with the Wii.
Developers naturally go to the winning format for a sustainable business. With limp sales of the PSP, it's natural that developer support will be lacklustre, and that's without factoring in the higher development costs for the console (another major consideration) making the returns lower.
Sony didn't notice the world was turning, and whilst now the PSP has a number of titles and features to make it a wise purchase, the damage has been done. The DS has laid waste to the market.
And the irony? It's far, far easier to wodge pirate software on a DS than it is a PSP.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Folks, we should probably leave the poor codger alone. Whether you come up with a calm, reasoned argument like Oddbob, or crushing statistical proof like me, Bruce is always going to cling to his religious belief that piracy is the cause of all failure in the games industry.
Why does he believe this? Because it's what he wants to believe, because it exonerates him and all his director pals for responsibility for their failure. Anything else means facing up to some hard truths (those pesky TEN MILLION SALES of Gran Turismo 2 again, utterly shattering the myth that the PS1 market of 2000 was dead at the hands of pirates, the colossal software-sales success of the easy-to-pirate DS against the much-harder PSP), and they'd rather blame a sinister devil whose existence can never be disproved.
It's how religion has worked since the dawn of time, and you can never persuade a religious zealot with feeble trifles like logic and facts. Let's give it up, eh? After a certain point it's just kicking a confused and frightened old man for laughs.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Sorry, this thread is getting too long. Could someone recap exactly how many copies Gran Turismo 2 sold?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"I have only refused to allow posts that were excessively defamatory or profane, including one of yours."
This is an outright lie. I posted a polite, reasoned question that was deleted despite featuring none of the above list of crimes.
Instead, what I did was ask a direct question from which there was no easy escape route, nor option to write, "But what you've got to understand is that piracy is not a victimless crime." And as such, it vanished.
I have another question. I shall be interested to see whether you delete this too, rather than concede to having lied above. I'm not even expecting you to answer it.
Have you, at any point in this debate, stopped to consider the arguments made by others? Your responses don't indicate a willingness to engage with the counter-arguments, but rather to repeat yourself a great deal, often with no relevance (eg. to tell people about how it's not victimless) or with statements that have been shown to be demonstrably nonsensical (eg. that the PSP can be pirated out the box). Has there been a point in the last few days where you've stopped before replying and considered the points being made?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Matt@100: I'm pretty sure that Gran Turismo 2, a PS1-exclusive game that came out at pretty much the same time as the very similar technical-driving game Toca World Touring Cars, when the PS1 market had been conclusively destroyed by piracy as Bruce has said, sold somewhere roughly in the region of TEN MILLION COPIES. Hope that helps.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
For the record, my deleted comment referenced the entertaining fact that this appeared to be a debate between 1984 Bruce and 2008 Bruce, since it was with his original quotes that people were retorting his current quotes. And then I said,
"2008 Bruce, while we all know that liking a game is subjective, we also know that far fewer people like really rubbish games, than those that like really good games."
I then asked a question about whether he believed that Imagine's later games were of a high enough standard to compete in the market.
As you can see, all excessively defamatory and profane, such that there's no possible way this reprise could be allowed to stay on the internet.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
From a 2005 TVG article:
"Debuting on the PSOne, figures for the original Gran Turismo stand at 10.84 million units (Japan 2.25 million, North America 3.99 million, Europe 4.29 million); on the same format Gran Turismo 2 sold slightly less at 9.34 million (Japan 1.71 million, North America 3.96 million, Europe 3.65 million)"
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Well, there you go. It was clearly TOTALLY ZAPPED BY PIRACY, and my figures were wildly off by a thumping 6.6%. Bruce was right all along. Dammit.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Stuart.
You first assertation was "the problem that you pissed away fortunes on sports cars and motorbikes" Patently wrong.
Then "All that money wasted blocking up the tape plant *wasn't* just a gargantuan misjudgement?" Misinformed and wrong.
You said "Every format currently available is easily pirateable" which is wrong.
You said "Throughout the entire history of gaming, "easy to pirate" = "huge success". " which is completely wrong, ask Sega.
Here "TOCA was eclipsed by your own Colin McRae Rally 2, for example, a very similar but hugely better game" you think that rallying and circuit racing are the same?
You tried to present a misleading picture with this "Severance that got an almost-unprecedented (only one game in the magazine's entire 15-year history has ever scored lower) 2/10 review "
You refuse to admit that the PSX didn't have a long tail, despite your own figures proving this.
And you describe yourself as a professional journalist.
This has inspired me to write an article for next week about someone who really is a professional journalist.
I have worked hard to answer the questions here, when I could be doing far better things. It is obvious by what is here that I haven't deleted anything that didn't deserve deleting (perhaps three posts out of 100).
The contention here is that I will not believe your account of things you did not witness and only know of third hand when I was there and saw what happened. I explained, in the article, a series of anti piracy actions that we took. Why would we do these if piracy was no problem? David Ward in the film goes on about piracy, why would he do this if it was no problem to him? Why did the Spectrum game publishers spend a fortune on lenslok and loads of other anti piracy measures if it was no problem to them? Why did the Spectrum game industry become mainly budget games if full priced games weren't being pirated so badly? It is obvious and logical that all this and more was because piracy was a significant problem.
It also killed off PSX development.
Has stunted PSP development.
Helped kill off the Dreamcast.
Has destroyed the PC boxed game market.
All because if people are not paying for games then there is no money to make them. This is logical common sense, supported by the facts of history.
And you have implied that piracy is a good thing, which is patently absurd. Why would Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft go to such expensive lengths to prevent piracy if it was good for them?
And that is me finished with what I am prepared to spend my time on here.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
I thought since I didn't buy a PS2 until more than a year after it launched and I was still buying AA PlayStation 1 titles a year after I had bought a PS2 it meant that the PS1 had a tail.
Having failed most of my economics courses in my college days, I shall endeavor to avoid using technical jargon from now on to avoid any more confusion from my misuse.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Again?
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
"Why did the Spectrum game industry become mainly budget games if full priced games weren't being pirated so badly? It is obvious and logical that all this and more was because piracy was a significant problem."
Er, full price games on the Speccy didn't really stop till 1989/90, giving it a good eight years. Nothing really to do with piracy.
Imagine crashed because they seemed to not know how to run a successful business - the megagames stayed mostly in the heads of the programmers. If Imagine had buckled down and produced some games of note, then they could have lasted as long as Ocean.
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
Er, clearly "You'd also not write untrue statements like," should read, "You'd also write untrue statements like,"
(Post later deleted by Bruce.)
I'm going to leave it with a short summary of all the facts and questions you've dodged, just for the record:
1. Given that TOCA WTC and Gran Turismo 2 are very similar games in the exact same genre released at about the same time, and GT2 sold almost TEN MILLION copies while TOCA flopped, how can you possibly blame piracy for TOCA's failure? There was clearly a vast market out there prepared to pay money for PS1 driving games of that type, yet they didn't buy TOCA.
2. If you don't consider a console having almost as many new releases seven years into its life as it did in its first year to be a "long tail", what on Earth WOULD you define as a long tail? (And do you still bizarrely insist that those stats are MY figures, even though all I did was count up the releases on the page YOU linked to?)
3. How can you make the absurd claim that Imagine was run "sensibly" when you yourself made published comments at the time like "The company is up shit street. There has been no proper financial control. Not even a VAT return has been done. It makes me sick,' he said to CRASH, to think that the people who have worked so hard to make the wealth of Imagine have been left high and dry while the directors of the company have stripped it bare and got away scot free. They did everything to line their own pockets"?
4. When you say "Vitality only returned to game development and publishing in the UK when largely copy proof game consoles game along", which consoles do you mean? And what's the point at which you consider the vitality to have returned? No need to be too precise, a year will do.
5. Do you still insist that an unmodified PSP is capable of running pirated games, or not?
6. How do you explain the massive software-sales success of the DS, by some distance the most easily-pirated of all current console formats, and how do you balance the enormous profits made by the DS with your claim that "The game industry only succeeds when it has pirate proof product"?
7. Do you dispute that Imagine's policy of booking the entire capacity of Kiltdale over the Christmas period (a) was designed to prevent your competitors getting their games duplicated, and (b) resulted in you being left with a massive overstock of unpopular games which you had to try to shift by cutting prices?
8. Do you believe that there was ever any prospect at all of GBP40+ Spectrum games being a sales success?
9. Do you believe that with almost all of Imagine's resources being devoted to the megagames (by your account in post #40), the company could possibly have generated enough income to survive until they were released, given that Psyclapse in particular was still nothing more than a vague concept?
10. Do you genuinely believe that games as poorly-reviewed as BC Bill, Pedro and Cosmic Cruiser had even the slightest chance of selling in the Spectrum market of the time, even at a reduced price which was still double that of the typical budget game?
11. Do you entirely blame the high return figures on those games on piracy, rather than them simply being returned by people who thought they were terrible?
12. Exactly how do you think other companies have managed to survive the 30-year onslaught of piracy, selling hundreds of millions of units? Is it some reason other than "making games that people wanted to buy, rather than crap ones that th