🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7938@mirsa.inria.fr> buffa@mirsa.inria.fr writes:
>
>Marble Madness is a good game, even if it'a pretty old. But if you really
>loved it, you should play it for hours and hours. In this case, what's the
>problem ? Rebooting takes only a few seconds.

And it is this misperception that is at the heart of half the trouble.

I keep around five megabytes of software in RAD: as a constant working
environment; if your game forces me to a cold reboot, rebuilding this
takes, not a few seconds, but fifteen to twenty _minutes_.  And in the
meantime, you have deprived me of all the useful work (compiling,
downloads, raytracing, spreadsheet recalculation, weave pattern calculation,
hailstone series calculation) that could have been done with the machine
cycles your game didn't need on my more than baseline configuration Amiga,
but hogged anyway.  The longer I play your game, the worse my loss.  So,
guess what?  I choose to play it the shortest time I can, which is to say,
not at all!  And since I won't be using it on your game, I can spend my
money on a game that respects my wishes as the buyer of a multiprocessing
machine.

No argument, there are tons of A500's out there in minimal configuration,
lots of them Christmas presents that are just fancier Nintendo sets for
their users.  If that is the _only_ market you care about, your game can
run cold boot to cold boot, with the worst copy protection scheme you can
devise.

BUT, at last count, some 10% of the _total_ U.S. population was capable
of at least minimal computer programming.  With a better set of educational
systems, the number is probably higher in Europe.  Nearly anyone who can,
given one page of instructions, an Amiga, and AmigaBASIC, will be able to
write a Mandelbrot program, badly.  You are selling into a crowd that bought
Amigas, so the programmers among them were either looking for graphics or
sound.  The graphicsoids will write the Mandelbrot.

It will run slowly (my first one took up to 36 hours per calculation) but
make great pictures.  Take me for specificity.  Guess what? I want to use
the rest of my machine for something while that work's going on, so I buy
an extra half meg of memory.  I try your game, and it trashes my Mandelbrot.
I tell ten of my friends with minimal configurations what a _rotten_ game
yours is.  It may actually be the best, most fun game going for the A500
minimalist configuration, but after hearing me badmouth it, they buy
something else.

You planned your sales campaign and game design around the minimalist
configuration, forgetting that word of mouth is much more powerful than
the best advertising campaign.  You forgot to look out for the needs of
_all_ your customers, and you lost out in the marketplace.

You think it doesn't happen?  Ask the folks who founded Technisoft how
fast a company can die when the word spreads across the net that its
product is a can of worms and it despises its customers.  Took us about
four months, maybe six tops.

Far better you should take the professional approach, forget the piracy
paranoia, and write the best Amiga specific game you can.  Take for
example Faery Tale Adventure.  It was pirated and the pirated copies
widely circulated within months of its release.  I know, I have one.  I
also have _two_ store bought copies, one still in the shrink wrap.  It
is still on the shelves, what is this, three years later?  Still selling
well enough to justify its place on a busy, busy rack.  Why?  Because it
is a _great_ Amiga game; all the pirated copies just acted as advertising
for the honest folks who wanted the game, by folks far too cheap to buy one.

Back then, in the days of A1000's and SOTS barely workable expansions, the
multitasking while playing a game market was miniscule, so it doesn't do
that; what it does do is really take advantage of all the then machines
best features to give super bang for the game buying buck.  Today that
same description goes to games that do great stuff while still obeying
all the Amiga rules for system friendly software.  Programmers have gotten
better, the marketplace has gotten more sophisticated, games that _do_
obey all the rules are in evidence and have raised expectations; this isn't
the 1985 Amiga game market any more, and writing games as if it were isn't
the way to get rich.

Look back through the postings and count the proportion that state flat
out "I won't buy copy protected software"; that's how much of your market
you throw away.  That has nothing to do with multitasking.  It has to do
with the inconvenience, and often added cost, of replacing worn out
game disks, with the damaging sounding racket on-disk copy protection
schemes cause, with the illegible and easy to lose keyword sheets, with
the difficulty of making my count of lines in the manual the same as
yours, and so on.  Even the minimal system owners are losing their cool
over being thought crooks and made to suffer through all this nonsense
by some game developers, while others publish without any kind of copy
protection and do just fine.

Just a note in passing, buried deep in this diatribe where it will never
be seen:  when you are ready to make your final master for the disk
reproduction company 1) run "copy ... all" onto a clean disk to make all files 
contiguous, so that you won't be beating my floppy drives to death seeking
across a fragmented disk, and 2) _look_ at what goes onto the disk; I just
bought a game that came with a free copy of the commercial assembler used to
create it, still on the disk.  Probably a $150 assembler product, on a
$25 game product.  Make sure that everything on the disk is needed for the
game, and that you have a right to distribute it!  These two steps can't
take more than an hour tops, at the end of a long game development cycle,
but the first makes the game much more pleasant to play, and the second
keeps you out of hot water and me honest, or at least less dishonest.

Thanks for listening, I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record
here.  One more insight:  if you make the Amiga look like a Nintendo
clone by the way your software operates, you modify the market's perception
of the computer away from its unique favorable qualities.  This hurts Amiga
sales, and over the long term, that hurts your sales, too.  There is some
synergy in doing the job right, since the opposite model then holds.

Kent, the man from xanth.
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>