Author: Mike Hood
Date: 15:43:19 04/05/03
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On April 05, 2003 at 08:21:41, John Jack wrote: >Why Can't Chessbase sell older Chessbase engines over the internet I doubt Chessbase will give an official answer to your question, but let me give you a few thoughts: In the "good old days" all the engines apart from Fritz itself were sold by themselves on floppy disks. Then, round about the time of the release of Fritz 5.32, Chessbase made the step of only selling engines together with a fully functional GUI. This had two advantages: First, anyone who wanted to buy Nimzo or Junior wasn't forced to buy Fritz first. Secondly, an opening book tuned for the respective engine could be included on the CD. Unfortunately, Chessbase wasn't very consistent. Despite an opening book being available, Chess Tiger 14 was only packaged with a generic opening book. Later on Chessbase made a backwards step by offering some of the weaker engines (the "Yong Talents") for sale either on floppy disks, or by direct download on the Internet. But this was never done for the major engines like Fritz, Hiarcs, Junior, Nimzo or Shredder. The disadvantages of old engines being sold on the Internet are (1) the copy protection would have to be removed and (2) it would use a lot of bandwidth to download the opening book. Personally, I think that Chessbase should give away the old engines free of charge. After all, the potential sales income for Fritz 5.32 would be very low in 2003, so not much money would be lost by giving it away. I don't mean giving it away on the Internet... that would be counterproductive, lowering sales of the new products. What I mean is that each new program CD should include copies of the older versions of the same engine. Seriously... is there any reason that someone who buys Junior 8 shouldn't get free copies of Junior 5, 6 and 7 on the same CD?
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