Piracy as Marketing

[First Spear]

Listening to the "Open Apple Podcast" #56, they are interviewing Peter Lount, creator of Gemstone Warrior. He said that his company in the 80s treated piracy as a marketing tactic, basically keeping copy protection minimal to satisfy legal stuff but the idea was to keep the game complex and immersive enough that people that got copies would want to go out and buy the game. Interesting.

[JasonlikesINTV]

I used to download albums from torrent sites to see if I liked them. If I truly enjoyed the music I'd buy the physical album to support the artist.

[+freewheel]

Listening to the "Open Apple Podcast" #56, they are interviewing Peter Lount, creator of Gemstone Warrior. He said that his company in the 80s treated piracy as a marketing tactic, basically keeping copy protection minimal to satisfy legal stuff but the idea was to keep the game complex and immersive enough that people that got copies would want to go out and buy the game. Interesting.

 

Funny that you mention this. I was just looking at some Amiga games last night for the first time, and their instructions make multiple mentions of the fact that they're not copy-protected, and that you should make a backup, etc.

 

Clearly piracy wasn't a concern to some people.

[First Spear]

 

A super-popular Apple ][ company was Beagle Bros, and they advertised that fact that their stuff had zero copy protection. They weren't the same outfit as SSI (company mentioned in that podcast) but maybe they had the same idea, I do remember them going out of their way to encourage "everyone" to try their stuff and then buy it in the store, without being shareware.

 

But there were plenty of companies that went out of their way to do wild things on the ][ like play with disk read timings and putting extra bytes on the edge of the floppy so the causal copier could not reproduce them.

 

Hmm

 

 

Funny that you mention this. I was just looking at some Amiga games last night for the first time, and their instructions make multiple mentions of the fact that they're not copy-protected, and that you should make a backup, etc.

 

Clearly piracy wasn't a concern to some people.

[Eric7100]

Piracy = "the act of being a pirate".

[mr_me]

Whether or not intentional, some very successful software companies today owe their popularity to the user base that piracy built in the 1980s.

[+BBWW]

Piracy is just what is means, stealing, I am not without sin. My ultimate Flashback has ROM's from 30 year old systems, that I will never play. I do own every Intellivision game released on cart...I have most of those ROM's but not all. Most that have been offered for sale I have paid for in addition to the Carts. I don't feel bad about having the rom of a game I purchased or a tune in my iPhone that I bought the CD's for. So I guess I'm 85% honest as 85% of what I have in my music collection I one a legal copy of.

 

There is nothing noble about theft.

 

If any of you are cabinet makers...would you come build me some cabinets. I can't pay you but I'll show all my friends what great work you do...the "exposure" should really help your business.

 

Piracy: The unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work: software piracy or music piracy.

[townparkradio]

Listening to the "Open Apple Podcast" #56, they are interviewing Peter Lount, creator of Gemstone Warrior. He said that his company in the 80s treated piracy as a marketing tactic, basically keeping copy protection minimal to satisfy legal stuff but the idea was to keep the game complex and immersive enough that people that got copies would want to go out and buy the game. Interesting.

What? Gemstone Warrior was almost impossible to copy on the 64. Good luck even finding a working disc image online.

[First Spear]

 

Homey, the interview was with the guy that did the Apple // original, maybe by the time it hit the C=64 it was disorder hired differently? He was talking about the time that his version carried the company profits for a few months so maybe that was before it came out on/for other platforms?

 

What? Gemstone Warrior was almost impossible to copy on the 64. Good luck even finding a working disc image online.