[vidarh]

Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.

None of us replaced them with consoles.

While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.

[louthy]

> Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.

Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)

[vidarh]

No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada.

The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users.

Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games.

But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles.

In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process).

In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that.

E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy).

Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.

Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.

[louthy]

> No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much

Neither does yours, at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

Your anecdote is “not me or my friends”

[vidarh]

It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.

> at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.

Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.

EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.

[ilkke]

And your anecdote is "not me or people I know of".

When you say the Amiga games industry is "extremely" large and vibrant, what contemporary platform are you comparing it to?

If there is an "extremely large and vibrant" aspect that makes the Amiga stand out, it is the demo scene.