Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tekig5!wayneck From: wayneck@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM (Wayne Knapp) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: No more Cinemaware stuff for Amiga !!!???? Message-ID: <4639@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM> Date: 9 Aug 89 19:16:27 GMT References: <9180.AA9180@heimat> <1989Jul30.210112.10525@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <925@corpane.UUCP> Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or. Lines: 47 In article <925@corpane.UUCP>, sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) writes: > One thing though Karl..... There are over 1 million Amiga's out there, not > 50,000. CBM passed the 1 million mark earlier this year. > > so 1,000,000 Amigas > maybe 100,000 potential sales > maybe 30% rather steal than buy <--- more realistic than 90%, but still high. > > 70,000 actual sales > > 70,000 * $50 = $3,500,000 > > if there was no pirating, then 100,000 * 50 = 5,000,000 but who is to say that > those pirates would have bought it anyway? Still 3.5 million is a hefty sum. > -- You must be the man that fell to earth! If you really believe what you are saying you should be selling your own program. There are several flaws in your above posting. 1) 1,000,000 Amigas sold doesn't mean 1,000,000 being used. 2) Selling to 10% of the market is almost unheard of, except for a very few programs like Deluxe Paint. Most software companies are singing in the streets if they can sell to 1% of the market. 3) A list price of $50 dollars means that the producer of the software gets only $20 from software distributors, that is if you can still find one that is still in business. 4) A nice box, manual, disk, and shipping runs an easy $8. 5) Pirates kill a large amount of impulse buying, which can easily amount to 80% of your sells. I know this because less than 20% of the sells every bother to send in registration cards. So the cash equation is more like: 900,000 * (.01) / 2 * $12 = $54,000 Even that may require heavy advertising at about $5,000 a mouth for say 6 months, costing $30,000 total. Leaving about $24,000 to split between everyone involved in producing the software. Now the numbers can move some, but the essence is that your $3,500,000 is off by an order of magitude. Sorry about the cold water, but is very hard to make a living writing Amiga software. Wayne Knapp