The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical.
Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD and the games were often much more expensive. Not to mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if you had Amiga friends.
In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one.
Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.