Xorg@cup.portal.com (Peter Ted Szymonik) (04/09/89)
One thing that troubles me more than anything its the complacency of some important people on the nationwide networks who fail to confront and challenge a company even if the company spreads the very rumors and un-truths that the entire ST community has been fighting for YEARS. You can speculate on the reasons behind this on your own... . Fortunately the ST user base is not taking Spectrum Holobyte's open letter so lightly. ST users on FNET, UseNet, GEnie, and elsewhere were already screaming bloody murder about Spectrum Holobyte's 'open letter'. Now Spectrum Holobyte has decided to add injury to their previous insult by spreading the letter among NON-ST specific magazines. I and many other have been FIGHTING for YEARS for greater recognition for the ST in magazines such as Computer Gaming World. I and many other ST owners have written letters to major software developers pleading with them to re-examine the ST market and see it as it really is and not base company decisions on unsubstantiated rumors. . With the tremendous success of DungeonMaster and many other ST programs we were finally actually getting somewhere, and now this. It seems to me that the very people who should now be speaking out and facing this threat to our user base and community are simply being blindly lead like so many sheep with blinders on! . Let me try one more time to show the flaws in Spectrum Holobyte's 'open letter'. (Mind you that I have four years of College level theoretical math and statistics behind me, but all thats required to under this is a basic high school education...) . The crux of Mr. Louie's letter is that since sales of ST FALCON were running behind that of FALCON versions for other computers, that somehow piracy was to blame and **ONLY** piracy was to blame. To back this nonsensical claim Mr. Louie brings in some sales figures. I took those SAME FIGURES he provided and viewed them in a PROPER context. Allow me to illustrate (which I have already done...) . Ex: Machine Type Sales of a 'good-selling' game program ----------------------------------------------------- IBM 40,000-100,000 MacIntosh 20,000- 40,000 ST 15,000 . Ex: Machine Type Sales over a week period of FALCON ------------------------------------------------------- Amiga 3x ST x . . The actual sales figures were not provided, this is deduced from Mr. Louie's comment that the Amiga version of FALCON sold twice as many copies of FALCON in six weeks as ST versions in nine. . Now mind you that these figures are not dreamed up, they are estimates provided by Mr. Louie himself. From these two 'statistics' ALONE Mr. Louie draws the flawed conclusion that ST sales have been hurt by piracy and that the ST is indeed a 'pirate machine'! That is completely unfounded and utter nonsense. Were Mr. Louie to present his claim in a Math class he would get an F. . Why? Because it is IMPOSSIBLE to draw ANY conclusions from sales figures without knowing the market size! A first semester business student knows that... . To get a better picture of what the REAL LIFE situation was I decided to examine the figures from a more logical and REALISTIC viewpoint by ADDING market size figures to the figures presented by Mr. Louie. The figures I stated were also not dreamed up, they come from reputable sources. I read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Current Notes, ST-Log, STart, MacWorld, MacWeek, MacUser, InfoWorld, Computer Shopper, ST-Express and many other business and computer magazines on a regular basis. When I see generally agreed upon sales figures appear in several different magazines from several different sources, in addition to financial reports posted by the major computer companies listing units sold, I'm sure you'll agree that the figures are generally accurate if not exact. Those figures are as follows (all figures for the United States alone.): . Atari ST: 350,000 MacIntosh: 1,500,000 MS-DOS: 10,000,000 . Now lets compare the figures Mr. Louie provided with the the market size figures to get a MUCH MORE REALISTIC picture of the situation. . Atari ST: 15,000 sales over 350,000 market size MacIntosh: 20-40,000 " " 1,500,000 " " MS-DOS: 40-100,000 " " 10,000,000 " " . Now lets look at the ratios. Using Mr. Louie's figures lets change the 20-40,000 MacIntosh figure to 30,000 and the 40-100,000 MS-DOS figure to 60,000. According to a bell curve this will give the average of a 'good selling' game program's sales figures for each of these machine types. . Atari ST: 15,000 3 ------- or -- or 4.2% 350,000 70 . MacIntosh: 30,000 3 --------- or --- or 4.0% 1,500,000 75 . MS-DOS: 60,000 3 ---------- or --- or 0.6% 10,000,000 500 . . (No Amiga figures are given since I don't know the generally accepted Amiga sales figures.) . . So now does Mr. Louie's claim a program released for the ST will not sell because of piracy? The answer is DEFINITELY NOT. In fact it, quite the opposite is true. The odds of an ST owner buying a new game program are on par and even slightly more likely than the odds of his MacIntosh counterpart buying one! The ST piracy stigma has been put to death, and long may it rest in peace. . Now unlike Mr. Louie I understand that there are many other factors involved. Facts such as MS-DOS machine sales figures include the vast number of machines bought solely for business use, that will tend to skew the MS-DOS figure, but mind you that this does NOTHING to alter the ST figures, they are mutually exclusive. . So what factors will affect the ST figures? How about advertising. Spectrum Holobyte claims that it spent $312,000 in advertising last year, yet they conveniently fail to mention that the amount spent specifically ST magazine advertising was ZERO. . Not until the February March issues of this year did ads for FALCON in appear in ST magazines. The ads which Spectrum Holobyte claims to have run were placed in Computer Gaming World and other NON-ST magazines, and given the MS-DOS and Amiga bias of many of these magazines, few ST owners were reached by these ads. And the ST owners who did see these ads were not aware that FALCON was out for the ST NO MENTION of this was made, only the words 'coming soon'. . How about magazine reviews? Again, those did not start appearing until after January of this year, and yet by this time Spectrum Holobyte was ALREADY proclaiming poor ST sales due to piracy! . If Spectrum Holobyte finds the same slow level of sales of ST FALCON six months from now then they *may* have a case. But so far the evidence is running against this 'worst case' scenario ever happening. Spectrum Holobyte listed sales of around 2,000 in late January, yet the disks which I just received are number 8,663 with advertising for ST FALCON being just a month old. Tevex, a national software mail order firm reports that sales of ST FALCON are running at a 'good clip' and ST WORLD, a leading European St magazine lists ST FALCON at the top of its sales charts beating out many fantastic European game titles. . I hope this 'open letter' gets passed around so that it may undo some of the damage Spectrum Holobyte has done to the ST community. Unfortunately I seriously doubt this rebuttal will ever reach the computer owners and developers that were blessed with Spectrum Holobyte's letter in the issues of Computer Gaming World and other magazines. . Peter Szymonik Xorg@cup.portal.com