What killed off the Amiga?

[amigamad]

Commodore was to blame they continued to sell the amiga and never done any real updates, look at the sound chip the same one from 1985 upto 1993 and the 68000 cpu had reached it end as far as speed was concerned,  As time went by graphics had moved on and 3d was now available for the pc and doom was so good that a lot of people could now see the pc as a viable alternative to the amiga. :-)

[IonDeluxe]

In my view, it seemed that commodore was hell bent on self destructing.

They did not market or adrvetise the Amiga, that was left to retailers.
They sunk huge amounts of money into thier PC clone section effectively competing with themselves and thowing that cash in a deep hole as that section was losing money hand over fist
they badly mismanaged thier finances.

I can only wonder what would have hapened if they had not put all that cash into x86 systems, and divided into marketing, development, and getting some decent financial advisors.

I shudder to think what the a600/a1200/a4000 would have been like with only a 1/3 of that cash squandered on pc clones was put into amiga development

[danamania]

The main bit I see was commodore resting on it's butt. Approaching the Amiga market like the C64. They could release a C64 in the early 80s and leave it unchanged for years.

The A1000 started out doing almost everything better than anything else.

The A2000/A500 didn't improve much, but the industry had moved closer.

The A3000 was a big step ahead, but everyone else had moved ten big steps ahead. A3000s were just "A very good machine" instead of completely eclipsing everything available

By the time the A1200/A4000 came out, as standard machines and with the expansion available at the time, there were some parts to the Amiga that were painfully behind, with a few exceptional abilities - cue the beginning of really wedging into the niche market

Those of us who stayed with Amigas for years afterwards (Until mid 2000 for me and my A1200) found that our machines filled our needs just fine, and as a fiercely loyal community the hardware from 3rd party suppliers kept coming out that enabled the older machines to keep up to date with a little work and a little hunting around.

dana

[mikey2001]

The fact that when the Amiga came out it could do almost anything for everyone (games, graphics, sound etc). By 1994 the Amiga was no longer in this position and was overtaken by cheap PCs which could have all manner of peripherals attached for low prices

[Matt_H]

@ amigamad

I still think Paula is miles ahead of almost any PC soundcard from before 1995.

@ all

I think bad management at Commodore was the primary cause, with piracy dealing the final blow in the post-C= years.

[Calen]

Commodore all the way.

While this may be another debate, piracy help shift alot of Amiga's, sad but true.

[Epyx]

I would have to say that ultimately games are what killed off the amiga.

Ironic isn't it? (warning*** some brutal honesty below...)

Multimedia and particularly games are what gave the Amiga its foothold...thousands upon thousands of C64/Atari and Apple gamers saw what the Amiga could do and wanted..nay drooled for an Amiga (circa 1986-1990).

While video editing provided an alternative market for the Amiga, games were (imo) the primary driver of Amiga sales during this period. Businesses in general did not adopt Amigas because of the already mentioned lack of business titles and tended to go with IBMs and clones, schools generally went with Apples (at least in North America).

Then around the end of 1990 three things happened that made gamers begin to doubt their Amiga as a games machine.

- VGA Card becoming an adopted standard
- Ad Lib card
- 386DX

Now of course the Amiga's sound was still far superior to the Ad lib card...but its market share wasn't. Now all those serious IBM business users had kids or they themselves could just run out and purchase a relatively cheap graphics and sound upgrade for their machine. Within just a year the market share for IBM and clone game machines swung in their favour.

I am sad to admit it...but you guys on this board who stayed with the Amiga were the true diehards (some of you gamers but most not)...loyal and true...

It was the gaming mutineers like myself that got greedy after seeing...

- Wing Commander
- Ultima 6
- Wolfenstein 3D

I know that all of my Amiga friends at the time were converted just based on one of these three games (and yes this was before Doom...).

So while many of you true loyalists stayed...us mutineers left...in droves...with much shame I admit we abandoned ship.

Now game publishers saw this emerging and growing (remember this game market share grew almost overnight for IBM and clones) market and began to abandon the Amiga themselves...

First Origin Systems abandoned the Amiga (although many would argue they did with Ultima V). Ultima VI was programmed from the ground up for IBM and clones as was Wing Commander. ID Software members developed on clones.

What Amiga gamers were left were treated to abysmal ports...has anyone tried playing Ultima VI /Wing Commander or Kings Quest 5 on an Amiga 68000?

Terrible...and utterly disgraceful...they straight ported most of it, failing to take advantage of the Amiga's strengths.

Kings Quest could have been done in Extra Half bright mode as most of it is static (64 colours as opposed to 32)

Wing Commander used bitmaps and could have been much better had it used the blitter as opposed to CPU intense drawing like the IBM version (which has not native bitmap or sprite support in 320x200x256 mode).

So games which first made the Amiga, eventually killed it.  Again hats off to you diehards and true loyalists...you did what I couldn't. You used your Amigas for so much more than just games..or you simply believed that things would get better...

Most of us didn't...and it is hard to sail a ship with 2/3 of your crew leaving...

sniff...

[thorrin]

@Calen

Agreed.  I doubt piracy had anything to do with it...  How much piracy is going around on the PC now?  Lets not even start to talk about PSX or PS2, yet those machines are very successful.  But yes, this is one of those often overdebated topics...  

My 2 cents, Amigas were too expensive and underpowered when the 4000 came out.  Plus many people didnt even know they existed :-)  Once retailers like EB and Babbages started pulling the software off the shelves here in the US, the Amiga instantly became a dead machine.

I was working at EB once (94) and I was talking to a PC guy about amigas.  Dude actually said 'But they cant even multitask!'  If you don't know at least THAT much about amigas, then that says a lot about how much marketing was going on.

-Thorrin

[commodore_jim]

@calen
"While this may be another debate, piracy help shift alot of Amiga's, sad but true."

That actually ties in perfectly with this debate I think.

While I agree that many people went out and bought Amigas because of the fact that their best mate/cousin/uncle or whoever would let them copy all their software, it was still one of the things that helped kill the Amiga.

While it was great at the start, with Commodore's tills ringing all year round, ultimately developers just got fed up and left. And can you blame them? Net result - diminishing software support = fewer machines purchased = financial woes for Commodore.

Finally, I wouldn't totally agree that it was Commodore's fault all the way. They did do some things right - surviving in the face of all that competition from the clone makers was just never going to be easy...

[Epyx]

As in my above argument I think the formula might have looked more like this...

VGA+Adlib+386DX+Millions of upgradeable clones = Attraction for publishers

Attraction for publishers+Sloppy ports+abandoning gamers = diminishing amiga market share

Really don't think piracy was to blame...it was the games themselves and a market share that was created almost overnight by IBM/clones.

[Argo]

I'd say mainly Commodore and it started before 1990. It was Greed, Mismanagement, and Marketing. The Colt PCs were a dumb idea and a waste of resources. While at the same time MS was aggressively exspanding and Apple was basically giving away Macs to schools and colleges.

[Marky_D_Sahd]

Here's what it WASN'T:
1. Advertising.  I have a drawer full of old Amiga ads in Time, Newsweek, National Geographic... No, they didn't do much T.V., and maybe their "Computer For The Creative Mind" campaign wasn't as effective as it could have been (I liked it.  Bought my first Amiga because of it), but the advertising was there.

2. Software.  Wanna see my 1990's catalogues of Amiga software from all of the old, defunct Amiga retailers?  LOTS of games, many of which sold Amigas to PC owners, Digita and Final Writer both had office suites which were competative at the time.  Great stuff at reasonable prices.

3. The 1200 and CD32.  Both machines sold out the roof, but debts had already done Amiga in by the time the CD32 hit stores.  Interestingly, the amount of software produced for the CD32 surprized a lot of people in the computer and console game world.  They thought that developers had long ago lost interest in the Amiga.  Wonder if that's still true?

Here's the story, short and sweet:  The worst case of corporate incompetence in history.  Even before Ali, Commodore had a revolving door of managers who basically undid the work of their predisessors to start their own, soon to be aborted ideas.  And Ali could have been the model for the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert.  
That's it.  PC clones?  Non-issue.  Microsoft survived the IBM PCjr., and Commodores error here was a calculated risk.  They lost, but they could have bounced back from it.  Piracy?  Yeah, big hurt.  But the end was management, that's really the whole story.

[Epyx]

Imo too many of us left and bought IBM/Clones for them to not be considered a factor...

They just didn't keep up with technology and had too much invested in proprietary technology. Almost every clone machine was upgradeable and come 1990 for very cheap. The only way most Amiga500 users (the majority of owners) could upgrade their machine was to buy a new one which wasn't always compatible...you could get accelerators but they didn't change graphics and cost an arm and a leg back then.

What was easy (on the wallet at least) was selling your A500 (the shame of it all) and having half the money needed for a 386dx 40 with 105mb hard drive, vga card, sound blaster etc.

Had I been able to upgrade my amiga 500 as cheaply and had the quality games been there I would have stayed and so would millions of others.

[6]

The Amiga is Dead?

Damn.  The news from outside the Village just doesn't circulate very fast in here.

I guess Amiga isn't #1.

[Borut]

Unloyal users and companys also had a bad influence.
After the death of C= the companys and users should all stand their man and the rest of C= would have been quickly bought by an prospective company who would have continued developement.

[Thellenbow]

Bad management? most likely
Piracy? I doubt it. However, there is one thing that no one has mentioned: proprietary hardware. Look, if you could have a machine that did everything the Amiga did and used open market components, then I think the Amiga would be hot right now! That was the hope of the AmigaOne. You can't have cheap hardware unless there is a lot of competition, which means anyone and their brother can make it. That's why pc's are dirt cheap today. What do you think would happen if everyone on this site could build a computer to run Amiga OS without having to pay AI for the privilage to make it and using off the shelf parts? M$ makes their money selling an OS and they don't care whose computer you put it one. It's the manufacturer's job to make the OS work on their computer. I thought this is what AI was going to do. I was fooled again. :-?