Calm down people, can't you just hug and make up?..
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Calm down people, can't you just hug and make up?..
I think it's time I took the patronising high ground with you and stop trying to even bother discussing this, it's times like this I wonder what the hell is wrong with me, I am actually spending the time to dispute a widely known fact why is this? why do I care that 5 or 6 people on a forum don't know what they are talking about when the whole rest of the gaming industry does?Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
So there you have it, all of you can carry on thinking that the Amiga was a popular machine in the US with it's lifetime sales of 700,000 in a country of well over 200 million people over a period of around 7 years. Whilst during the same years the C64 sold over 10 million and the NES sold 30 million
At the end of the day you lot think the Amiga was popular simply because you have extremely low expectations of what a home computer can realitically be capable of.
There's at least one thing I got out of this discussion, I now follow the idea people have told me that there was no such thing as the "video game crash" in the US, the gaming market simply went -
Atari 2600 -> Commodore 64 -> NES -> Genesis -> SNES
This can be plainly seen in the total nosedive the home computer market goes through as the NES grows in popularity, and as everyone keeps telling me the IBM PC was not used for gaming and was primarily a business machine so it was in a separate, unrelated market.
LOL, not only are you backtracking but you are still wrong, all models of the Amiga were on the market simultaneously with the NES, the 1st Amiga, the 1000 came out the same year as the NES arrived in the US and the last big Amiga the 1200 was out of the picture by around 92-93 which is when the NES' eventual decline was going on that led up to it's formal discontinuation in 95'Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
and really, you can go on about all the "different markets" each Amiga was aimed at all you want but at the end of the day people were only ever arguing the popularity of the 500 specifically anyway and they've already stated many times that it was aimed at the gaming market.
You're an idiot, unless of course your Dish network just happens to play Gears of War or Little Big Planet or Killzone 2 I don't see how it's comparable to contemporary consolesQuote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
The Amiga however did play Super C, it did play Rainbow Islands, it did play Bubble Bobble, it did play Newzealand Story/Kiwi Krazy, it did play Commando, it did play Ikari Warriors, it did play Battletoads, it did play Ghosts N' Goblins
The 500 (the system people are arguing for) was in one piece, you plugged one lead into the mains supply and one lead into a monitor (or TV if you wanted to) you slotted your game in and a controller into the joystick port, turned on and it automatically loaded up, thats it, not very complex is it? in fact it's pretty much exactly what you did with a NES isn't it? course you could slot in an application instead of a game if you wanted to, not that many people I know ever did.
Where the Super Gameboy is concerned I don't see people buying a Super Gameboy and a SNES just to play Gameboy games on their TV, and anyway wouldn't this be comparing the Super Gameboy sales not the Gameboy sales? I'm pretty sure the Super Gameboy didn't outsell the Genesis.
I'm not even going to bother reading this all. I'm just happy that J-Factor had the time to answer my question in the heat of this debate.
Believe me none of this argument is worth reading :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by TheEdge
All it really comes down to is peoples varying expectations on what makes something popular.
You could say that the Amiga was popular in the US with home computer hobbyists whilst the Amiga was popular in Europe with gamers in general (giving it mass market appeal which it did not have in the US)
Oh, so its just an "opinion" war.
Good luck to both parties. You guys will be here for a while.
Nah I've had it with this argument, when I get annoyed with a discussion I tend to go too far so I'm backing away from it, any derogatory remarks directed towards me from now on will simply be answered with -Quote:
Originally Posted by TheEdge
The sales figures speak for themselves, if you can find a reliable source that puts US Amiga sales over at least the 4 million mark then I would honestly be interested in seeing it.
It happens a lot here. No worries. I'm debating if I should buy some more carts.....I'm fighting the urge.
Hyperstone Heist and Rolling thunder 2 & 3 are calling my name.....
I found the arguemant somewhat interesting, but I would have frankly liked to hear a bit more on the Jaguar Topic specifically. There was mention of the bottlenecks in the hardware -the 68K usually being the main example- but in the post referring to this, it was mentioned that the prograsmmer speculating that the 3DO and 32x were actually more powerful. (though Doom would seem a good counter example of this, full screen with high detail and smoothe framerate)
I don't want to ignite the Amiga argument more, but I think it really can't be counted in the console market directly, neither an the C64 (or Atari 8-bit etc). While they could be specifically marketed as gaming machines (and were much better at it than the IBM PC's until the late 80's), they were home computers, and were used for a lot more than just games.
The home computer gaming market is a bit different as well, in addition to some games similar (or available on) dedicated consoles, they include generes that are sparse (or nonexistant) on consoles, like flight simulators, and point and click adventure games. (not to mention text based adventures) While consoles can generally be marketed at a fairly wide audience, home computers are a bit more limited, generally not as apealing to young kids, or adults not very fimiliar with computers. (particularly in this time period) Granted the plug and play interface of the Amiga moderated this a bit.
But generally the home computer gaming market should be treated seperately from the dedicated console market. Of that market, the Amiga was fairly popular in the US, and (the 500) probably the most capable machine on the market prior to more capable PC's of the late 80's and early 90's. (late 286 early 386, VGA, and sound card, particularly the Soundblaster -which added digital sampling and an onboard gameport over the Adlib)
And I do dissagree about the 1983 video game crash comment. You can't just say home computers filled the gap. There was a whole mess of issues with the US game market, and while home computers did displace the market to some extent at the time, this was largely not to popularity of use as gaming consoles, but rather as multifunctional home computers. (and the problem with the glut of poor quality shovelware type games was still present in this part of the market as well)
Additionally, no other time than the ~2 year period prior to the rise in popularity of the NES has the console market really been displaced with home computers in any meaningful respect. (shure ther's plenty of competition of the video game market with computers, but not in this manner)
And in many ways the rise in computer popularity was a response to the problematic console market, particularly with Atari more or less dropping out of the console market entirely for the time. (who knows how the 7800 would have effected things had it been fully released in 1984)
Sorry to clutter this thread with something off-topic, but that's joke.arnold's fault. Someone mentioned that the PC was THE home computer for games in the 90's, and I pointed out that the Amiga was bigger in games in the home computer market up through the early 90's. Someone else pointed out that the Atari ST was reasonably popular as well. So a few of us were talking about popularity for gaming on HOME COMPUTERS IN THE LATE 80's TO EARLY 90's!! Then idiot boy started yammering about how the NES was bigger than all of them... like the NES was somehow a 16/32 bit home computer. He just didn't get it through the entire thread. That's the last I'll say about it here. Again, sorry for the clutter.
On the Jaguar, I was looking around, and it seems like the 68K CPU ("manager") wasn't a major issue in the Jag. According to some discussions I found over on the atariage forums the major "bottleneck" was the slow DRAM used in it.
The sales figures speak for themselves, if you can find a reliable source that puts US Amiga sales over at least the 4 million mark then I would honestly be interested in seeing it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chilly Willy
Also you are a moron, unfortunately you can't grasp the concept of niche markets and mainstream gaming markets. Just because Home computers were never popular in the US and were always relegated to a low selling niche market doesn't mean they were everywhere else
I don't really understand why home computers were so unpopular in the US, were they quite stygmatised? were most home computer fans characertured as a bit beardy? the types of people who sat around playing Dungeons and Dragons all the time?
This is the only idea I can come up with really, if those computers were stygmatised I could understand that this would limit their appeal to the mass market forcing them into a hobbyist market of only people who liked computers.
Lastly just updating the numbers, I read through an article in retrogamer the other day and it says that the Amiga 500 alone sold over 2 million in the UK
What you are saying here is that the NES should've had the limited appeal because it could only be used for games whilst the home computers could do both which should mean that the Amiga/C64 should've sold more than the NES because they cater to a more far ranging audience of different people with different wantsQuote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Ok here is another reason you've brought up on why the Amiga should've outsold the NES, more genre variety, whilst having masses of platform games with cutesy characters it also had flight sims and point and click adventures for teenagers/young adults.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Translation, home computers were badly marketed in the US, instead of a healthy dose of kid friendly adverts with children playing platform games that had graphics that would've blown away the NES including stupid lines like "Amiga does what nintendon't", and other adverts showing teenagers playing flight sims or the usefulness of the machine with dad sitting getting his work done they probably just had the most boring looking ad ever, probably with a bunch of old pensioners standing around in a kids room whilst the Amiga had terrible graphics programs running on it and no sign of games.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
I'm not too sure either way, as I said this is an idea I've heard put forward many times, whats making me think it's right is just the fact that the C64 sold so well in the US whilst everything that came after sold pretty badly until the PC gaming market appeared in force during the early 90sQuote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
4 million isn't much to talk about either. I'm pretty sure the Atari 400/800 computer line was able to crack 4 million, but it was hardly considered a popular computer.Quote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
The North American market moves at a much quicker pace. If you want to sell something here, there's no problems getting distribution chains in place and your product placed all over the country within a year. Europe, on the other hand, takes forever.Quote:
I don't really understand why home computers were so unpopular in the US, were they quite stygmatised? were most home computer fans characertured as a bit beardy? the types of people who sat around playing Dungeons and Dragons all the time?
This is the only idea I can come up with really, if those computers were stygmatised I could understand that this would limit their appeal to the mass market forcing them into a hobbyist market of only people who liked computers.
The C64 was just as popular, if not more popular, in North America as it was Europe. The big difference was that in North America, it came out in 1983 and was pretty much forgotten by 1988. Sure, you could buy software for it in 1990, but it was usually found in the back corner of a store by then.
The Amiga lasted about as long as it should have. By 1990 it was 5 years old and the hardware was starting to get outclassed by high end PCs. Europe, on the other hand, seemed to drag the dated hardware much like they did with the C64 and Spectrum.
This is a facinating topic, and everyone brings up good points, but what I'd like to know is this: How did X computer sell against X computer in the US? I was just curious how the different computer brands sold in the US back in the 80's and 90's.
Everyone knows the NES dominated the US video game scene back then, I was just curious about the computer market back then.
So you're agreeing with me? YAY, I agree that 4 million wouldn't have been "uber" popular but I think that kind of number would've shown at least some level of popularity.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Like the US did with the NES you mean :pQuote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Hell the NES hardware was absolutely ancient in comparison to the Amiga hardware, the UK critics must've been astounded that Nintendo actually thought they could bring the NES out as late as 87' and compete with the Master System and 16-bit Amiga, especially at the price they were asking for the games, if someone was willing to pay that amount of money then they'd might as well pay a little more to get the Amiga and be able to use it for work as well as gaming.