Johannigman

Hey, I am happy to have the discussion as long as we can remain polite and civil. Yes, when I was at EA, we had a very public pro-Amiga, anti-Atari stance. Trip was well aware that competing technology platforms make it difficult for consumers to know what choice to make. When that happens, consumers are reluctant to choose either platform until there is a clear winner. It happened with Betamax vs VHS - VCR's did not become commonplace in homes until Betamax died off and consumers could choose VHS with confidence. It happened again later with Blu-Ray vs HD DVD disks. Nobody adopted either in mass numbers until HD DVD quit and Blu Ray became the de-facto standard. Trip wanted to ensure that consumers could clearly choose ONE technology platform with confidence, and he felt that IBM PC's and Atari ST's were inferior to the Amiga. So he put all his chips into a bet on the Amiga. Ironically, while the Atari and Amiga camps squabbled over which platform was better, one de-facto home computer standard did emerge, eclipsing all others - The IBM PC. EA was late to the game in developing for the PC because Trip had bet heavily on the Amiga. Thankfully, they were able to change course in time. But please don't try to believe that, if EA had only supported the Atari ST more, it would have become a successful hardware platform. That was not, as they say, in the chips. Jeff

Okay, so you "don't think that games for Atari ST were pirated more than for any other popular computer. " You have your opinion. We had the sales data from numerous publishers that showed that the Atari ST had a massive piracy problem in its user community. But what irritates me more is the attitude that, if games were cheaper, pirates wouldn't steal them. Sorry, I heard that excuse from every pirate since day 1 on my job at EA. It doesn't fly. If you were caught stealing a Porsche, how hard do you think the judge would laugh when your defense is, "Porsches are just too expensive. If they only made them cheap enough for me to afford..."?? Software companies run the same way all other businesses do - they price their products as low as they can to cover their expenses and hopefully make some kind of small profit margin. Truth to tell, most games lose money, and publishers are only sustained by having the rare big hit pay for the losses of 5 other near misses. What is true is that piracy causes price inflation. More copies pirated means less copies sold, which means companies need to charge more per copy to cover development costs. It's the pirates, not the publishers, who were driving up prices for the legit customers. Do you know of any publishers who succeeded and grew back then with the strategy of, "We will sell games much cheaper than everybody else, so nobody will pirate us any more"? Almost every publisher I worked for in the 80's (Broderbund, Synapese, Epyx, even Atari) went out of business went out of business because they could not get sufficient sales to make a profit. Worse yet, I saw numerous talented game developers driven out of the business into more mundane work, because piracy cut so badly into their royalty income. So please, don't even try whining to me that, "Games cost too much. We were justified in pirating it."

"If they're going to make that decision for that reason, at least advertise the heck out of it as an anti-pirate message." Nope, that makes no business sense. If you have x amount of marketing dollars, it always makes more sense to spend them advertising a product you are selling to customers who are buying. Why waste that money sending a message about games you aren't selling to customers who aren't buying them?

Just ran across this topic, and thought I should clarify. The additional info that did not come up in the interview was that EA's games sales for the Atari ST were already terrible. We were already debating how many more games, if any, we wanted to continue putting out for the Atari ST. Our intelligence said that software sales for the Atari ST were abysmal for our competitors as well, and that piracy was to blame for much of it. Given that context, the call that Trip got was "the straw that broke the camel's back" on our ST support. It was not the sole factor in his decision, just the tipping point. Is that story a little more plausible now? Jeff Johannigman