To hell with it.

[desiv]

I think a lot of it too was the original cost of the machine. Paying 500 dollars to upgrade a 600 dollar amiga seemed very steep, while 500 dollars to upgrade a 1300 dollar PC seemed pretty reasonable.

That was basically it for me..
Also, it was cheaper than that for me to get my first 486.
At the time, there was a thriving "upgrade your PC" market, and I would help people upgrade, and frequently get the leftovers.
So, I had no problem getting a case, PSU, hard disk, even a VGA monitor (bad cable, I fixed that) for free...
All I have to buy was a motherboard and CPU, so I was able to get my first "doomable" PC (486, I had older PCs before that) for under $200.

Upgrading my Amiga at the time would have been something like $400-$500 for the accelerator, and then I still had to add memory...
(I can't remember, but I know when I looked, it was something I couldn't afford at the time..)

And that would have been so I could run a few games better, but most didn't get any improvement from it.

desiv

[desiv]

It seems better/more sound effects was more common, but that was more a function of more RAM than anything else.

It's interesting that, in general, PC developers didn't feel the same way.
They pretty consistantly developed at hardware that wasn't common, basically forcing people to upgrade to really enjoy their games.

And it worked..

There wasn't a huge CDROM market on PCs when Myst and 7th Guest were released..  a lot of people bought CDROMs just for that..
(Well, and the Groliers Encyclopedia that I got with my first 1x CDROM ;-)

But they got you in small increments..  
A video card was, generally (there were always the high end, but) $200.
Sound card, less than $200.  CDROM, less than $200.  Faster CPU, less than $200, etc..

But, to upgrade the Amiga, it was:
Accelerator/RAM, $500.
CDRom (for the 1200, would have been something like the Squirrel PCMCIA and an external CDROM) for .. something much more than $200...

Just, on the Amiga, the chunks were too huge..

PCs got me a smaller chunk at a time..
(I hope you appreciate that I didn't do a really bad CHUNK/CHUNKY2PLANAR joke here...  I was considering it... )

Actually, if there was something like WHDLOAD at the time, that would have been a huge reason to upgrade..  The ability to put your games on the Hard Drive (a lot of which were "floppy only") AND not have to reboot to exit them?  That "might" have been worth the cost of an accelerator/RAM at the time..  If I could have scraped it up (College Student then..)..

desiv