How a Stupid Patent Killed the Amiga

[ajlwalker]

Sounds like 'the straw that broke the camel's back'.
People strive to find simple answers, it allows for closure. Given everything else that was wrong at Commodore at the time, if this patent dispute wasn't there it would have just prolonged the eventual demise.

I tend to agree with you.  However, who knows what could have happened?

The CD32 sold very well in the UK and literally owned the CD-ROM sales charts.  90% of all CD-ROM sales were on the CD32 format.

If Commodore could have emulated that in the US, it could have perhaps kept them going.

I suspect the Amiga would have been forgotten about and they'd have proceeded with a console based on the Hombre chipset, which I believe was almost as powerful as the Playstation 2, but years and years earlier.

Perhaps nowadays we'd have Commodore, Nintendo and Microsoft fighting it out and Sony would be licking it's wounds after a failed Playstion.

[ajlwalker]

@achtung bab

Yes, it was a joint project with Nintendo for a CD-ROM add on for the Super Nintendo.

Somewhere along the line they fell out and Sony carried on the R&D for what would become the Playstation.

[ajlwalker]

Why would this patent only affect sales of the CD32 and not the other Amiga models that sold in the US?  I am not saying the patent had no impact, but something does not add up.

The patent would have affected the other models.  However, there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of these machines already in the supply chain.

Commodore in anticipation of bringing CD32 to the US market ramped up production and had hundreds of thousands of CD32s sitting in a Philippine factory.

When you put it in that context, they effectively bet the farm on the CD32 and then couldn't sell it!

[ajlwalker]

...Another part of the question: Dave Haynie wrote in Deathbed Vigil that Commodore might have survived with 400,000 US sales - could they have made that many sales without the supply problems?

I would say it was doubtful, but there WAS a chance.

So far as I recall the CD32 sold 100,000 units in the UK in short order.  Probably a similar amount in Germany and the rest of Europe.

The US market is, what, six times bigger than the UK?  However, the Amiga wasn't the popular games machine in the US that it was in the UK/Europe.

I reckon they'd have matched the UK sales at least, and if they got some momentum and good titles out there, word of mouth could possibly have done the rest.

I maintain though that if CD32 would have been a success, then Commodore may have dropped the Amiga computer and carried on with the game console market.