Plug-Ins: ur doin it rong...

A notable press release came out a couple days ago from Prosoniq. They say they’re discontinuing Windows development because of piracy. Seriously. Bernard essentially says that because of their simple serial copy protection, their products are so frequently pirated on the Windows platform that it has become financially untenable to continue dev for that platform. If you were looking for the World’s Greatest Example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, you could print that press release out and hold it up as a shining beacon of logical failure.

Now, I would be exhibiting a pretty healthy dose of temerity if I were to chastise the creator of the very first non-Steinberg commercial plug-in. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that if you can’t manage to sell shit, it is hardly ever the customer’s fault. Having a nearly impenetrable purchasing process, an incredibly poorly managed website, and a product line that has no consistency in platform availability and updates probably has way more to do with a lack of Windows sales, if you’d like my opinion on the matter. And who wouldn’t?

Speaking strictly for ourselves, it’s kind of difficult to tell as we give each customer both platforms, and thus don’t have specific platform purchase info. But if I go by installers downloaded, our Mac users (or I should say “our Mac customers”) outnumber our Windows customers by around 2:1. Of course there is more piracy on the Windows side of things – that goes without saying – but my recent go-round with Fucktwat Douchbag proves that Windows users are by no means alone in their tendency to want Free Shit™. In my experience, the per-capita stupidity on OS X is lower, but only just. It’s that Mac users, by virtue of being able to afford the Mac Fanboi Tax, are also able to afford actually purchasing software. Apple’s planned obsolescence also helps tamp down piracy by making it a generational thing. I could easily use the original 1.0.0 release of Orange Vocoder on my current Vista PC, but that original Mac release is about 5 deep on the Fail Meter and completely unusable on a current Intel Mac, in any way, shape or form.

(I suppose it’s a good time to mention that 10 years is a long time in this business. Orange Vocoder as a product is still more or less the same, and that would account for stagnant sales more than any other factor, I believe.)

Anyhow, I honestly doubt Prosoniq is going to go out of business any time soon, as they get to suckle at the Yamaha Money Teat with frequency. But it’s certainly an odd thing to just delete a platform and blame the consumer base rather than your own selves. It’s easy to make and sell Windows plug-ins. Really, it is.