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Originally Posted by
Thenewguy
I don't agree with those points.
Firstly as we know for a fact from sales figures the C64 didn't cut into the videogame market in the US at all, not on any level, Atari 2600 was selling 8 million a year at its height in the US, NES was selling ~9 million at its height, and the SNES and Mega Drive were selling over 4 million each at the height of the split 16-bit market.
C64 sold only 2 million odd a year in the US at its height, and a ton of those buyers most certainly bought it as a computer and not a games machines. Activision stated in an interview in a British magazine that their computer software market was primarily Europe, as average Americans didn't like to use computers to play videogames on.
Best case scenario only 25% odd of US gamers switched over to C64, and thats not taking into account those who bought it strictly as a computer (making them part of a new emergent market, not the previous gaming market), which could realistically be over half, leaving more like <15% switchover.
I said catalyst, as in short-term effect. Unless you have specific sales figures on game consoles and computers (namely C64) for 1983-1984, this will behard to argue either way.
The #1 problem in any case was distribution, plain an simple. Flawed distribution led directly to massively inflated demand projections, leaving to overproduction and oversaturation of the market. (a so-called market bubble)
When that bubble burst, it left massive overstock with more modest sales. Sales may have stabilized if not for the inherent problems of massive overstock: huge losses of investment. (that stock cost money to build and costs even more money to store if not sold quickly, so manufacturers and publishers were pretty much screwed, forced to sell far, far below cost to clear excess stock -or if that wasn't enough, scrap the stock if storage wasn't possible)
Retailers OTOH were not significantly harmed since their contracts allowed unsold merchandise to be returned to the manufacturer for refund (greatly exacerbating the problems of said manufacturers). The main problem with retailers was the loss of income from games from the crash, and the need to shift to other products.
So, to avoid the crash, you'd either need to fix Atari internally, or you'd need a very powerful competitor fairly early on that avoided Atari's critical pitfalls in distribution.
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The $100 rebate C64 price is irrelevant, all new systems for the last 20 odd years in the UK have had a trade-in policy, just because you could trade in PS1 to get a PS2 £50 cheaper at launch doesn't mean we should write the PS2s price at £250 in 2000, same goes for C64, some people would've traded, some wouldn't, some would have found lucky cheap machines to trade, whilst some would be sending in machines they bought full price at launch, some may well have traded more expensive machines or up to date machines like Atari 800's
It's a different context though. With the C64, you could trade in a Pong console or Timex 1000 for that rebate. (in the latter case, some computer dealers actually bundled Timex 1000s with C64s just to get the rebate -since the Timex machines were under $50, so effectively $150 for a C64 ;))
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with the $100 price you're talking about an uber best case scenario, ie buying from a shop which is selling C64 for less than they bought it for (trying to make money on accessories) buying no accessories (including the required disk drive), buying a TS-1000 from a dealer who's trying to dump stock for $10, and then sending the system to Commodore for a $100 rebate.
The standard price inn 1983 was $200 US . . . at mass merchants (ie K Mart). However, CBM had a weird issue where distributors for dedicated computer dealers were actually selling machines for more than the mass merchants. (partially due to CBM's distribution channels, and partially due to very low margins on the mass merchant's sales)
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1# Market stagnation, 80% of the games coming out in the US on consoles (not computers) were rip offs of other games, there was very little originality going on and people were losing interest.
There was tons of originality, but the oversaturation obscured the newer/better/original games. (again, a direct result of poor distribution)
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2# No quality control, and no built up infrastructure to spread info on which games were great, and should rise to the top, and which games sucked, and should be buried somewhere in a desert. Result? a lot of people paying out good money for crap, and a lot of people becoming disenchanted.
Atari had no control over 3rd parties . . . and couldn't without lock-out.
There's a handful of examples of that within Atari, but the vast majority of truly bad games were from crappy short-lived 3rd parties jumping on the bandwagon. (again, in large part due to inflated market projections) ( . . . ET is a bit buggy, but it's a decent adventure game for the time IMO, but also one of those games where the manual is 100% necessary to play, and a well-written manual is also important)
It was far more of a problem for manufacturers/publishers to produce bad games than for people to get turned-off buying them. If the games were unenjoyable, they simply wouldn't sell well. Some might be disappointed and return them to stores, but few would likely keep them if they were really dissatisfied.
The bigger issue came from the potential for massive losses from unsold stock and a flood of super cheaply priced games from overstock. (thus leading to massive losses for publishers with overproduced games . . . good or bad)
The main problem with ET had nothing to do with quality of the game, but everything to do with excessive licensing costs (Warner forced it, Kassar had expressly declined the offer previously due to unreasonable cost) and a high production volume being made as it was the only way the game could be profitable. (in hindsight, it would have been better to plan to lose money from the venture and make only a few hundred thousand carts, sell them all, and have a small fraction of the losses of the millions unsold)
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3# People needed to be moved on properly from Atari 2600 to the next generation, where new things could be done with both presentation and gameplay, and people could rekindle their interest in videogames, Atari did not push or create a new, stable platform, all they did was throw out loads of different machines and confuse people, constantly causing upheavel every year or two whilst milking 2600 for all it was worth. At the same time there were loads of other consoles arriving which were splitting the market in loads of different directions, and adding to the confusion.
They didn't throw out loads of different machines, they threw out 1 and planned to replace it with another to address mass criticism (well, Warner forced that, Atari Inc may have opted to try correcting the 5200 itself). And, again, the reception of the 7800 in 1984 was quite positive. (the main criticism being that it didn't seem like the market would support any game system at all at the time)
The only other machine was the A8 computer line . . . and while they could and should have marketed that as a next-gen game machine (IMO), they screwed that up with mismatched market positioning among other things. (similar but distinct problems in Europe too -the biggest issues being lack of a low-end/cost-cut model and easily accessible programming documentation for 3rd party/home developers)
It should also be noted that the 3200/Sylvia design from 1980/1981 was intended to be a direct successor to the 2600 with A8 (but with direct 2600 compatibility), but a combination of factors led to that being canceled. I need to check my previous conversations with Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg, but I think the main reason for the shift to the 5200 was the idea that the 3200 might marginalize the A8 computers somehow (not sure). Though, honestly, it would have made far, far more sense to just release a lower-cost (directly compatible) gaming variant of the A8 in 1982 rather than the 5200. (they could have even used the Atari 600 prototype as the basis for it)
If they weren't going to add lock-out to a new console and weren't going to make it VCS compatible, it really should have been A8 compatible.
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4# Too much product and waning interest from disenchanted gamers, leading to retail overstocking, and then being forced to dump masses of games at cheap prices. After being burned so badly retail was subsequently wary of stocking videogame systems and software.
Retailers were not really burned (as mentioned above), and consumers were burned only by difficulty in wading though the crap to get to the games they liked. It was the manufacturers who really felt the sting from masses of unsold merchandise and underpriced sales. (if a retailer was dropping a price on a game rather than returning stock, it generally meant the manufacturer had rebated the retailer to avoid dealing with more overstock in warehouses)
Hell, it was a boon for many retailers actually willing to take on overstock . . . sometimes for free. (manufacturers simply had nowhere to put it, storage was more expensive than scrapping it, but giving it away was even cheaper than disposing of it)
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It doesn't sound like it to me, they were planning to dump their latest console (5200), and release two others in the same year, they still sound completely without focus to me.
The Amiga console wasn't to be a mainstream console at all, but a special high-end multimedia platform that would be expanded to a computer. (atari had a fairly advanced unix based OS and GUI planned as well -both for their shelved in-house designs and the MICKEY)
In the end, Amiga pulled out anyway, so it would have just been the 7800 and 2600 (and A8) in 1984.
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But being that they had already released it, they should've stuck with it and worked to maximise its potential, we've seen what some of the A8 homebrew games can do, the hardware was still very respectable, and had not shown even a small percentage of what it could do. Better to work on improving the system, keep their fanbase happy, and astound the magazines with new impressive games that make them retract their complaints, than to dump it and start again so soon after release.
Agreed (especially with the right marketing), and that's what Atari was already planning on doing with the updated joysticks and 5200 Jr. (though they really could have cost reduced it further than that)
However, it should also be noted that with only 16k, it would be difficult or impossible to do some of the things shown on the A8. (and RAM expansion wasn't properly supported via the cart slot either . . . at least on unmodified models incapable of using the 2600 adapter -the service modifications for that automatically make RAM expansion feasible though, and all later models were like that out of the box)
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The main problem with Pacman was that it was programmed like crap, my 60 year old mother can play that game infinitely, and I mean that literally, the ghost AI, speed, and layout are so bad that even someone fairly bad at Pacman can play it and never actually be killed simply because the enemies are so bloody useless.
Funny that that's not the main complaints you see levied towards it. (mostly the graphics -flickering/color/animation, sometimes sound)
