Firstly, there were a number of other software companies which survived long into the 1990s, Ocean being one. Others still exists today, Infogrames springs to mind.

Secondly, even though software WAS being copied in great numbers, and nobody are saying Imagine games were not copied, there is no guarantee that Imagine would have sold more units if piracy was made impossible (or at least very difficult). In a functioning market with unlimited supply (in practice) of a product, but with many competitors, and limited tender (for the purpose of purchasing said product), only the companies which supplies the best articles will succeed. Imagine released 12 games for the ZX Spectrum and a few others for other plaforms. Of those, I can only remember enjoying one; Zzoom. And even that one did not really compare well to other contemporary games like Manic Miner, Ant Attack, any Ultimate – game just to name some.

Thirdly, the “Megagame” concept was tested: Mikro-Gen released Shadow of the Unicorn in September 1985 to rather weak sales [http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/046/news.htm]. I don’t think Imagine would have fared bette with a target price of £30-£40….

Piracy has existed ever since technology made it possible to make a good enough copy of any creative work (I believe it was Tennyson who coined the allusion) with relatively easyness. This is a fact which any company which operates in mass production markets needs to relate to. No, the demise of Imagine was not the fault of piracy. It was a plain management problem. As an outsider I don’t have all the answers, but the Cavendish deal, the Kiltdale blunder, exuberant vages and general high overhead all contributed more to the demise than piracy.

By swapping games and music it actually encouraged myself and my friends to continue to buy more so we could trade them.
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This is quite a contrast with the ‘1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale’ view.
When I used to swap and copy a few tapes for my C64 as a 9 or 10 year old (I got about £5 pocket money a week if I was lucky – compare this with today’s ridiculous €70-80 for a full-price PS3 game here in Ireland) I found that over 90% of the games were pretty bad.
I’d have to say that I spent almost the same time loading games on tape as I did actually playing them.

Then there were the duff copies and dodgy originals. I picked up an original tape of IK, one of the few C64 games I liked (along with Midnight and Resistance, Sly Spy, Nightbreed and a few others that came with the machine anyway), and at first it would load successfully 1/2 of the time. A week or so later and it was loading 1/5 of the time. Then it became completely useless…

When I moved to the Atari ST, things were similar, and gameplay didn’t really improve. Only this time, 90% of my disks were cracks.

It’s pretty simple to see why casual copying caught on. Part of your basis for assuming that piracy killed Imagine was the testimony of some young kids doing work experience or something.
How much cash do you think they had to spare? A few quid a week? How many games is that – maybe one or two a month?
Imagine how they felt when they found that a large proportion of the games they bought were absolute trash, leaving them with no money. Doesn’t it make sense for them to turn to casual copying to, at the very least, TRY a game to see if it stinks before losing all their money and feeling stupid when they realise the game they’ve bought is rubbish (e.g. Red Heat, Terminator 2 and many other movie tie-ins around then)?

Newsfield didnt seem to do enough with the 16 bit era and people chose different 16 bit mags from the ones Newsfield sold. Saying piracy also caused Newsfield to go out of business is laughable.

People just moved away from most of the mags Newsfield created.

Do you have any specific evidence that shows how game piracy was responsible for Newsfield closing? I’d always thought that the company’s demise was brought about by a long and expensive covermount war coupled with the end of the 8bit era. Newsfield simply didn’t have an Amiga or ST mag to carry on with, presumably because they spent a fortune sticking full price games on covermounted tapes. Which, in itself, is another factor that helped devalue the industry in those days.

Piracy has always been a problem, but it seems like you’re pointing at everything that ever went wrong in the UK games industry and saying “PIRACY!” with little actual evidence to back it up, when most of it can just as easily be explained by a generational hardware shift and good old-fashioned mismanagement.

How many times have i paid for a game that crashes all the time? thats so short I’ve completed it in less than a weekend? thats so like every other game on the market at the moment that i might as well have reloaded wolf3d! The worst part is most of the time as a gamer i can tell that whatever rubbish i’m being offered is just anouther pointless clone created by advertising departments to strip me of the few notes in my pocket.

I have no pity for you drivers of flash cars with your power meetings and your big money transactions, developers have been treating users like idiots for years, showing nothing but contempt for their end user base – why should gamers care that developers can’t to afford to eat at de’laieys tonight? As far as most gamers are concerned that developer should be in the office writing a patch for his defective game!

That said, i don’t pirate games anymore it’s not that i would have an objection to it on a moral ground it’s just that these days all the games i play are open source. All this nonsense about ‘oh we couldn’t make the games if they didn’t cost £50′ i always laugh when i see it and think of good ol’ linux.

By swapping games and music it actually encouraged myself and my friends to continue to buy more so we could trade them.

Now I’ve no idea if that still works in the modern world but a quick google for anyone doing any research into it seems to provide some evidence that some people at least think it does.

These days of course I have no friends and therefore have to buy all my music and games for myself

And from that you make the assumption that tape to tape copying is what killed the company. I say this is jumping to a conculsion – you have no evidence of cause and effect. Your YTS employees are not representative of the game-buying public as a whole at that time.

I don’t argue with you that copying games reduces sales, but as a kid who grew up while all this was going on (and therefore a member of Imagine’s primary market) I know that with my pocket money I was lucky if I could afford one game a month. So by copying I could get more games; I was a kid, I didn’t understand the morlas of it, I just saw more games… But, and here’s the point, this allowed me to save up and buy those very special games – the original and excellent games that I really wanted. So I, and almost everybody I knew, was still buying games as frequently as before but now we were being more selective and saving our money until we saw something really worth spending on instead of just buying the next generic platform game as soon as it came out.

Games companies today seem to have learned this lesson – everything is a franchise now; one successful game spawns a clutch of sequels and the fans of that franchise will even queue outside shops to be the first
to own the latest installment. It’s all about marketing, branding, and creating fan loyalty to a game by giving them what they want and then giving them more of it. The problem with Imagine (and other company’s) approach was that they basically lost all their fan loyalty by disappearing while they created their mega-games; the clutch of cheap-and-crappy stuff they released in the meantime only did their image even more harm. I remember that when the Doctor Who game from Micro Power came out, most people thought Micro Power had already gone out of business. They hadn’t released anything in ages and suddenly this huge box that cost a year’s pocket money arrived. Nobody was going to spend that sort of money on something from a company whose last few releases had been, as I recall, pretty pisspoor. On the other hand, if Acornsoft had released ‘Elite II’ on 4 floppy discs at 40 quid I’d have been first in the queue. Give us what we want and we’ll buy it. Give us rubbish and we’ll find something else to do, like copying it and playing it once before we decide what we thought all along – “god I’m glad I didn’t pay for that”.

Wrong. Once the protocall content formats for 1 version of the game gets fully reversed, private servers can and will be made, and then those special pay extras will be availible to whoever wants them. And if the game is good, there will be plenty of fans willing to create their own new content once the tools get around.

Granted, private servers arn’t as widespread as most cracking, but if more games are released that way, they will be.

You can continue your interesting argument but I’ll leave you with one anecdote.

I used to go to a pub called “The Beehive” in Swinton to swap pirated games in 1988/89. One day FAST raided the place. About 50% of the people questioned by FAST worked for Ocean, Binary Design, Icon, Software Creations and all the other games developers in Manchester.

All charges were dropped.

Did I mind piracy? No. Did it kill the industry? No. Do I still write software now? Yes. Do I still buy software? Yes, if I use it often enough. Do I still pirate software? Yes.

Imagine were (from where I was standing) a bunch of “show off” Scousers who spent too much money. Get over it.