bhabbott Quote:

OCS/ECS was the past. Commodore's hardware development cycle was much faster in AGA times, due to better chips and tools for them.

Better chips and tools were available but that takes an R&D budget. Dave Haynie talks about the minimal R&D budget and longer turnaround times of newer chips because MOS couldn't make them. Lisa was only using 1500nm CMOS and HP had to make it for them. Hombre, AA+ and AAA would have all likely used 1000nm or less which was still relatively old as 68k CPUs at that time were around 500nm. C= was vertically integrated which should have given them a hardware advantage but it takes investment to maintain it.

bhabbott Quote:

It's a bit disingenuous to suggest there were no changes made to the chipset in 7 years. The maximum number of bitmap colors was soon doubled with EHB mode. ChipRAM addressing increased to 1MB and 2MB. ECS provided VGA scan rates with flicker-free hires output and bigger blits. Sprites could now be displayed in the border area, and 50/60 Hz frame rate was software selectable. This was accompanied by radical changes to the OS to support the new screen modes etc., and to make it more 'professional' and easier to expand in the future - paving the way for AGA and Amiga OS 3 which was released 2 years later. For sure these improvements were mostly only 'incremental', but big changes were not really needed during this time. Maintaining a large user base of like machines was more important. Game developers were still wringing more out of OCS even in 1993 after AGA came out, because that's where the main market was. Some of those later OCS games were so impressive that it was hard to tell they weren't AGA!

There was still only one major chipset upgrade in 7 years and it is was more like wait 5 years and then rush out something with minimal changes to at least look better. AGA was a major upgrade and it was lame development as it should have had the AA+ chipset specs. OCS to ECS didn't change much for the user except more chip memory even though there were some functional improvements. Supporting PAL was important for C= as they would have died sooner without European Amiga sales. ECS should have been out in 1987 instead of 1990. The Ranger chipset could have been out not long after at that if C= was on the ball. AA+ should have been out by the time ECS was out in 1990. AA+ uses ~200,000 transistors which is about the same as a 68020 CPU introduced in 1984 and having an average sale price of around $80 in 1990 with Motorola markup which likely fell to about $24 in 1993 when the CD32 was introduced. AA+ still planned to use 2 chips increasing the cost but that was likely because C= was using an older chip fab process. Maybe it needed too many pins for one chip at that time though. I'm not talking state of the art but just middle of the road silicon instead of 10+ year old silicon C= liked to use.

bhabbott Quote:

VGA modes should perhaps have gotten more attention, but Commodore made the curious choice of introducing ECS with the A3000 which had a flicker fixer built in. A2000 owners also were using flicker fixers, and A500 users were not that interested in running monochrome 'productivity' applications that benefited from the VGA display.

The VGA modes in ECS were about worthless outside business use because there wasn't enough bandwidth for more than 4 colors. The Ranger VRAM would have fixed this and probably wouldn't have cost much more than adding memory twice in the Amiga 3000, once for chip ram and again for the flicker fixer. AGA in the Amiga 3000+ would have solved this without a more expensive flicker fixer too.

bhabbott Quote:

In 1993 Commodore was planning on a yearly product update cycle, first with AA+ and DSP in 1994, then Hombre in 1995. They also planned to continue cost-reducing the existing design with greater integration like they did with the CD32. By early 1995 they expected to have a 'system on chip' including integrated CPU to maintain backward compatibility, freeing future designs from the limitations of the original chipset without compromising performance.

Lew Eggebrecht had good plans for decreasing the C= development cycles and the tech improvements and integration sound right on. Finally someone who understands the Amiga, its strengths and its weaknesses but how far did these plans get? My understanding is that they never made it off paper and I don't blame Lew. C= was in a dire financial position by that time and had no R&D budget. The 1-2 years lost by the Mehdi Ali and Bill Sydnes double whammy was nearly impossible to recover from.

bhabbott Quote:

As a CDTV and CD32 developer myself I can say that it wasn't needed. The AGA machine most developers targeteed was a stock A1200, which didn't have FastRAM. But the CD32 did have something that made it much better - the 2x speed CDROM drive with virtually unlimited storage, fast loading and 'free' 16 bit audio. That went a long way towards relieving the pressure on RAM usage. FastRAM would have sped up the CPU, but it was already 2-4 times faster than the 68000 in the A500, and AGA had much less DMA contention issues. Any developer who couldn't get something worthwhile out of that wasn't worth the title of 'developer'.

It is nice that the 16 bit CD audio could be mixed very cheaply and sounded great but it is not as universal as more performance and memory. One thing the Amiga CD32 did not have was very much 2D hardware for a console. It only had 8 sprites with limited features on palette, flipping, rotating, etc. and no tiling support. The Amiga CD32 had to make up this deficit with blitter objects (Bobs and AGA didn't get any blitter enhancements) and CPU grunt while usually using more memory. It was easy for the Amiga to add CPU performance if more was needed. The 68EC020@14MHz was quite acceptable when the Amiga was introduced only being beat by the much more expensive 3DO with cacheless ARM CPU that was no powerhouse either.

bhabbott Quote:

Now sure, for some games a faster CPU was necessary to achieve the desired performance. But once you went down that rabbit hole there was no end. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom needed at least a 50MHz 030 for barely acceptable performance, and Alien Breed 3D was even more demanding. Today we have pretty mundane games that need RTG and an 80MHz 060 or Vampire, simply because they are there. OTOH Dread runs amazingly well on a stock 2MB A1200.

Wolfenstein 3D may have run at acceptable speed on a CD32 using Akiko chunky support. It runs great on a 68030@28MHz with fast ram so at least doesn't need a high clocked 68030.

Wolfenstein 3D for Amiga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AwPaHTbZz0

A mid clocked 68030 with fast memory in a CD32 probably could have managed barely playable Doom performance but probably no worse than Alien Breed 3D on a stock Amiga CD32. I found a video and, with the Akiko chunky support, Doom is more playable than Alien Breed 3D, especially if the window size is reduced some.

Doom on the Amiga CD32! A side by sidee comparison stock 14Mhz 020 VS 50Mhz 030
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5N8F1egmNc

It's not like fps games deliberately use more performance and programmers who port them should be able to lower the spec to a 68020@14MHz. More advanced 3D games use more realistic 3D engines that require more CPU performance or dedicated 3D hardware. The engine may be able to be downgraded and optimized some but it becomes an unrealistic expectation at some point.

Last edited by matthey on 14-Sep-2023 at 10:12 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 14-Sep-2023 at 09:58 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 14-Sep-2023 at 09:52 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 14-Sep-2023 at 09:49 PM.

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: @agami ... It's like they actively tried to disprove Moore's Law by thinking the 68000 was good enough forever!

I like this statement

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@Turrican3

Quote:

Turrican3 wrote: @BigD Scratch that: do you think the market was there to move 7 figures units of the CD32 ? Because I frankly don't ...

If it launched at $249 or better yet at $229, I think it would've sold 1 million units in the first year.

Though looking back, I don't think 1993's C= had the manufacturing and distribution capability to move that much inventory. So yet another moot point.

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@bhabbott

Quote:

bhabbott wrote: ... In 1993 Commodore was planning on a yearly product update cycle, first with AA+ and DSP in 1994, then Hombre in 1995...

I'm sure someone at Commodore was planning this, but the only plans Commodore as a whole appeared to be interested in executing, is how to make the most amount of money out of the least amount of expenditure and work.

The good intentions of the people in the engine room don't amount to much if the ship's captain is sailing in the wrong direction.

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@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: ... The original Xbox didn't sell well outside the U.S. and was a financial failure ...

The 4-year run of the original Xbox was never intended to make money. It was a loss leading strategy to establish a foothold in the growing gaming console market. At the turn of the millennium, the Xbox play was the only workable one to position Microsoft among the top 3 console platforms.

Microsoft had initially planned for the proper Xbox (360) to follow the quickly cobbled together cut-down PC platform in 3 years. It took an extra year, and even then we know that they jumped the gun a little bit, due to their fears of the upcoming PS3. Even with the Red Ring of Death phase, the 360 outsold the PS3 for the majority of the years the two were concurrently available.

Interestingly enough, the Wii outsold both of them. With less raw power, but with its X factor.

_________________
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@bhabbott

Quote:

bhabbott wrote: @Turrican3 Quote: the console market is well known to be usually quite cold regarding add-ons. And an SX-32 (or equivalent expansion) would have increased the price even further, for a console that wasn't exactly affordable in the first place. Doesn't sound like the recipe for success, does it? The CD32 wasn't like other consoles. A significant number of users were expected to expand it to full computer status, and many did. The expansion port would give it an upgrade path like 32x on the Mega Drive but implemented much more elegantly.

But the console buyers were like console buyers. And game developers for the Amiga were like other game developers.

I doubt Commodore launched the CD32 with only existing Amigans in mind. Well actually, based on what they were smoking at the time that may have been their limited intention.
Anyway, what @Turrican3 has stated is a known fact. The majority of consoles sold have had varying degrees of hardware expandability over the years, and the numbers for any of the marketed expansions have always been low.

Even some of the more successful expansions/add-ons such as Xbox 360 Kinect and PlayStation Move, which by 2012 had about 27% and 24% purchase rate, respectively.
PlayStation VR, which sold 5 million units by December 2019, in an ecosystem of 108.9 million PS4 consoles, accounts for only 4.6% of PS4 console users.

Even if the SX1 was as popular an add-on as the Kinect or Move, and 25% of CD32 owners purchased it, the majority of game developers would still target the lowest common denominator, i.e. the same spec as the 75% of unexpanded CD32s.
It's the nature of the console market beast, so it's pointless to release a console into this market that is "not like other consoles".

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@agami

Well the USP was still that it could be expanded into a full Amiga computer. Guardian, Speedball 2, Flink, Simon the Sorcerer and Wing Commander are great on the CD32 however a lot of games got stuck on disk based systems! You really needed access to the full Amiga software library!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@matthey

Quote:

Nintendo wasn't about performance and still isn't about performance but is niche.

Sorry but... what?!
Nintendo was still pursuing the high end in 1993 (--> N64), at least in the home console space, up to and including the Gamecube.

Plus they're definitely not niche (and arguably have never been globally, as they have always had at least one very successful product per each generation), as the Switch is currently the third best selling console in history and, if they play their cards right, might even take #2 or #1 spot.

=================================

@bhabbott

Quote:

Not dead, but suffering badly from piracy that wasn't so much of a problem on the PC due to it's much larger user base and more affluent (and less savvy) owners. The CD32 - or more correctly the CD-ROM format - was the answer to that. Once CD-ROM became the preferred media it would help mitigate piracy on other Amigas too, making it worth developing more sophisticated titles for the Amiga or porting them to it. Developers just needed a sign that their efforts wouldn't be decimated by rampant piracy, and the CD32 provided it.

Piracy has always been a huge issue for the Amiga but in 1993 many publishers had already left.

CD burners would soon become mass market but even ignoring that, I think biggest, insurmountable issue was that among the very few that were still supporting the platform basically nobody was developing games that justified the massively increased space.

Heck, I for one have a very hard time recalling anything significant released in cd format for the CD32 except perhaps Microcosm (which was an average game to say the least and definitely not the killer application it badly needed)

Plus, I find it very unlikely that the average PC user was less savvy than the Amiga counterpart, if anything just considering the most popular model was the A500 where you just inserted a disk and play... a luxury that is basically not there yet with PCs (and likely never will, as the respective targets are quite different)

Quote:

I do, because that is what I was doing at the time. We would have been very happy with sales in the 100k region, ie mere 1% of the potential market at 10 million installed units.

With all due respect, a publisher targeting a 10 million CD32 installed base when the whole Amiga line had failed to sell half that amount in a bit less than a whole decade was either out of his mind or going bankrupt in a few months. Or both.

Quote:

The CD32 wasn't like other consoles. A significant number of users were expected to expand it to full computer status, and many did. [...] You only have to look at the A500 to see where it might have gone. Once games came out that needed 1MB the market for trapdoor RAM expansions exploded.

Couldn't remember the exact amounts so I resorted to the good old magazines (scans) of that time.

The SX-1 in Italy (late 1994) was selling at roughly a staggering 80% of the CD32 price. While the CD32 being different than the past existing consoles might be true, we have very little evidence a significant share of its owners was willing to purchase such an expensive add-on. Sure, economies of scale would likely allow the price to go down but again, the same logic that plagued the CD32 itself apply here: what was supposed to drive sales of this expansion?

Just to keep the comparison more or less consistent, I had a look at a mid-1990 magazine, and the 512K expansion cost about 25% the price of the A500.

I'd say we're talking about very, very different scenarios here.

=================================

@BigD

Quote:

Well the USP was still that it could be expanded into a full Amiga computer.

Unique at that time... sure. Not an effective selling point though if you ask me: the platform you were looking to get full compatibility with was already slowly, horribly dying and it's not like it had been a huge, unambiguous success in the first place either (even compared to its theoretical predecessor, the C64... Japanese consoles sales were a totally different thing so no point in taking them into account I'm afraid)

Perhaps CD32 might have led to a sudden, late (?) resurgence of Amiga software, but to achieve this goal you not only would have had to sell a huge amount of units but you should have successfully targeted an audience mostly different from the existing Amiga userbase first and foremost. Something I'm not sure Commodore was capable of - even ignoring Sony was going to revolutionize this market segment relatively soon.

Last edited by Turrican3 on 15-Sep-2023 at 02:31 PM.
Last edited by Turrican3 on 15-Sep-2023 at 01:38 PM.
Last edited by Turrican3 on 15-Sep-2023 at 01:37 PM.

@Turrican3

Yes, a resurgence in Amiga sales through the CD medium was required and possible. It didn't help that Commodore had no 1st party software studio for games/apps. Maybe a 'Seal of Approval' scheme was needed to demand new content, gamepad multi-button usage and a ban on up to jump!

Last edited by BigD on 15-Sep-2023 at 02:14 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

It didn't help that Commodore had no 1st party software studio for games/apps.

Yup they really should have kept their games development capabilities. Which apparently wasn't that bad, either.

Quote:

and a ban on up to jump!

Pfffftttt, we would have figured out ways to circumvent that.

Case in point, my home-made mod of the PSX pad to play Rainbow Islands with my Amiga joystick, as apparently I could not (and *still* can not, by the way) jump and simultanously shoot rainbows with any other control scheme:

https://twitter.com/Turrican3_IT/status/1688208600877993989

Well, when putting aside more difficult things like using AAA chipset instead, based upon David Pleasance Commodore Insider Story book, it does seem there were couple of realistically doable factors that could have happened had things gone just little bit different.

First was that Pleasance was pleading Mehdi Ali to delay CD32 release by half a year so they could have better game lineup etc. and that it wasnt delayed, could have well even made some games that would have been released at the release to not appear at all.

However, it is also fair to ask if CD32 release would have been pushed by that hald a year, would we then even have CD32? Davids opinion was that CD32 didnt really make difference to (christmas) sales, that people would have anyway bought A1200s instead of CD32, which is another interesting thought of what about current userbase if CD32 had been delayed and people had bought A1200s instead.

But one thing I do point out is that as far as I understood, CD32 was actually selling pretty well.

But another but, it is very interesting thought that Consoles really took off at around the time CD32 sold, so had it been delayed by half a year and been succesful launch then, could it have been the Console instead os PS1 or something, and even have saved whole Commodore?


This gets to second realistic possibility, it seems CD32 could have sort of been the Playstation instead. For David tells how he and Mehdi are visiting Psygnosis and Psygnosis is suggesting oof using some same chips that Playstation ended up using, and while David understood the potential and if I correctly recall, there was even no cost difference or something, Mehdi strongly disagreed taking it personally as who do those guys think they are to advice us, the hardware firm how to make our products. This could have changed CD32 radically for better.


Third realistic possibility is something I think David had a real brilliant plan and right timing and which could have worked out if Davids group had got the commodore instead of Escom.

For David was thinking that homes multimedia machines are going to be a big thing, and he was right, that was what was happening that I remember how some of my friends too bought these multimedia eguipment that could play all the music equipment and videos at same time. Davids thought was to sell companies CD32 to integrate into these multimedia players, since they need some device to operate all these things together and enable possiblities, and with CD32 intergrated into them, they in addition also have game console in their machines.

I mean, it still wouldnt be that bad an idea to be able to buy a Blu-Ray player that could play CD32 games, if there would just be a legacy first. That was real great plan I think, and one David might have been even able to pull off, even if he hadnt had the muscle to pull Amiga technology further otherwise.


If those things had went differently, who knows what CD32 would have been.

@Bugala

Quote:

Bugala wrote: But one thing I do point out is that as far as I understood, CD32 was actually selling pretty well.

By what metric?

Quote:

But another but, it is very interesting thought that Consoles really took off at around the time CD32 sold, so had it been delayed by half a year and been succesful launch then, could it have been the Console instead os PS1 or something, and even have saved whole Commodore?

Only if they sold it at regular console prices.

1. Launching the CD32 at $399 and selling 100,000 units at about $250 per unit profit, equates to $25 million in total profit

2. Launching the CD32 at $229 and selling 1,000,000 units at about $25 per unit profit, equates to $25 million in total profit.

Commodore went with scenario 1 because there is less effort manufacturing and distributing 100k units.
If they went for scenario 2, their first year profits would be about the same, but they would’ve ended up with an install base of 1 million units. An ecosystem much more appealing to game developers.
With an average annual attach rate of 3 titles, and with $6-$9 royalty per game sold, that would be another $18 million to $27 million per year for C=

Then, and only maybe then, would they have had a chance to save whole of Commodore: If that was their intention.
What we know now is that their main goal was to find a buyer for the company, and just be done with the whole thing.

Last edited by agami on 16-Sep-2023 at 01:27 AM.

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agami Quote:

If it launched at $249 or better yet at $229, I think it would've sold 1 million units in the first year. Though looking back, I don't think 1993's C= had the manufacturing and distribution capability to move that much inventory. So yet another moot point.

C= was big and not bad at manufacturing. While they certainly had distribution issues in some places like the U.S., I don't think this was a problem in their primary markets in Europe. The right products, PAL vs NTSC, had to be produced in the right quantities and shipped to the right places which takes time. I wonder if they were running out of AGA chipsets as C= had mistakenly planned for more ECS chipsets to be sold a few years earlier and had to increase Amiga 1200 production which used more AGA chipsets than planned. Most other CD32 electronic components were off the shelf commodity parts which is desirable. I expect the big handicap was the dire financial position so they likely needed to sell some CD32 inventory before they could afford to produce more. This may be why the launch was slow and the high price was what the market could bear in order to maximize profits to produce more inventory. Survival likely required JIT manufacturing and inventory management along with a quick turnaround of inventory. Maybe the XOR patent in the U.S. was the monkey wrench that forced C= into bankruptcy with misallocated NTSC CD32 inventory but the U.S. market was going to be difficult for C= anyway, despite the U.S. usually being one of the largest console markets. Considering their financial situation, knowing they had marketing and distribution issues in the U.S. and knowing that the XOR patent payments would be due, they should have abandoned the U.S. for the time being and made more PAL CD32s which still may not have saved them.

It would be interesting to know if the CD32 $399 launch price was high enough to be seen as unreasonable gouging and trigger the fairness effect. If that was the case then C= should have lowered the price and/or increased the value which could have been done by including more games much like THEA500 Mini and David Pleasance Amiga game packs. My NTSC CD32 which I bought for $150 shortly after C= went bankrupt included Pinball Fantasies/Sleepwalker (normal 2 pack), Chaos Engine and Microcosm. Including extra games loses long term game royalties while increasing short term income from CD32 sales. Normally, the CD32 could be sold at a lower price to increase market share while still enjoying a nice profit margin but the current competition made pricing the console difficult for consumers. The Sega CD offered ok value only if already owning a Sega Genesis and the CD32 had better hardware. The 3DO was hot stuff but was priced out of most consumer console budgets. Savvy consumers knew the Atari Jaguar would arrive soon but it didn't have a CD-ROM drive and the CD32 had more games. Other new consoles were years away unless you lived in Japan. If C= was healthier then they could have lowered the CD32 price for market penetration but I don't think they needed to go lower than $299 at introduction considering the competition at the time. They could have included extra games for value and adjusted the price based on the competition over time. They needed to make some money off the CD32 hardware which I consider to be less risky than razor thin profit margins or subsidizing the hardware as a loss leader. Even knocking $100 off the price could have doubled the sales volume as the CD32 was similarly priced to the Amiga 500 where Jeff Porter said that it would happen. David Pleasance asked for an Amiga 300 priced around $300 which he thought would double the sales volume compared to the Amiga 500 priced around $500 but he received Bill Sydnes Amiga 600s instead, one of the mistakes that put C= in their financial situation. I respect that you want to grab market share for the Amiga CD32 in our alternate reality which is worth billions in less than a decade, at least to Microsoft.

agami Quote:

The 4-year run of the original Xbox was never intended to make money. It was a loss leading strategy to establish a foothold in the growing gaming console market. At the turn of the millennium, the Xbox play was the only workable one to position Microsoft among the top 3 console platforms.

Indeed. Microsoft lost $4 billion on the 2001 launched original XBox to gain a ~33% market share in the U.S. and ~15% market share worldwide by 2004. That's a lot to pay for a presence in the console market but they were afraid the growing console market would replace the shrinking desktop market as more computer like functionality was added to consoles. It didn't happen as much as expected because most of the consoles are closed hardware instead of open hardware like the CD32. Consoles are now practically fully functional computers yet customers are only allowed to do what the console business allows them to do with their own hardware. I wish there was other options and at least an expandable budget console on the market like the CD32 may have become with cost reductions but Amiga failed and is now only AmigaNOne on the desktop using ancient embedded PPC hardware, emulation on other hardware or simulation on flexible but non-competitive FPGA hardware.

agami Quote:

Microsoft had initially planned for the proper Xbox (360) to follow the quickly cobbled together cut-down PC platform in 3 years. It took an extra year, and even then we know that they jumped the gun a little bit, due to their fears of the upcoming PS3. Even with the Red Ring of Death phase, the 360 outsold the PS3 for the majority of the years the two were concurrently available. Interestingly enough, the Wii outsold both of them. With less raw power, but with its X factor.

Yea, the XBox 360 won the least bad PPC battle with the PS3 even though the console still had overheating and other hardware issues. MS should have stayed on x86 for better compatibility and better optimized ports from desktop x86 games which is one of the reasons why they switched back later. The PPC G5 was released in 2002 which was the turning point for PPC showing the folly of high performance PPC which had neither the performance or power savings expected. The Wii was Nintendo refocusing on game play instead of console hardware dominance and showing there is room for alternative consoles even if they don't compete with performance consoles. The Switch is another example of innovative game play and usability which has the performance of a budget console but is also a mobile gaming device that costs as much as a normal console. Nintendo is at its best when it is different but good. The 68k Amiga was different too but it wasn't good enough, at least with C= in charge.

@agami

Quote:

If they went for scenario 2, their first year profits would be about the same, but they would’ve ended up with an install base of 1 million units.

Had they sell those 1 million copies...

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@agami

Quote:

By what metric?

just my recalling that it had been mentioned somewhere that it was maybe 100k units sold in that half a year, which wasnt bad sales amount for that time I think, although, that is not based upon hard metrics, just my own faint recalling, that I suppose that 100k in half a year in 1994 was still a good amount, when considering that they didnt wait for better launch etc. That basically they went to market unprepared and still managed to sell that many, plus they couldnt sell it to US at all.

Point being that what if they had waited that half a year and prepared properly, what had the numbers been then, plus I also think that the console sales, generally speaking, really started only after Commodores bankruptcy, that it was about right after the bankruptcy that consoles started selling everywhere. For of course 8-bit nintendo had already sold a lot before, but I would say that generally speaking consoles became household item only after Commodores bankruptcy and very fast after that. Of course there is the question that did Consoles became household item because of Playstation, or would they have anyway become household item at that point. For if it was because of Playstation, then CD32 wouldnt have benefited from that possible Console sales boost.

@Bugala

100k units over 6 months in 1994 might not be considered bad, but it also isn't all that good.

When I asked "by what metric?", I should've been clearer and asked by what standard, or what benchmark? We can't look at simple number relationships such as number of units over time, e.g. Out of those 100k units:
- what percentage went to first time console buyers?
- what percentage went to buyers who have a SNES or Mega Drive (Genesis)?
- what percentage went to buyers with a NES or Master System?
- what percentage went to buyers with a PC XT/AT system?

I suspect that the vast majority of those ~100k units went to existing or previous Amiga owners, specifically across these distinct economic brackets:
- Current or previous A500/A600 gamers who saw the CD32 as a cheap entry into AGA gaming
- Big box OCS/ECS Amiga owners who prefer not to use their professional or semi-professional systems for gaming + entry into AGA

The above demographic would encapsulate consumers between late teens and early 30s. The bulk of which would be in their 20s and would not see a price tag of $399 as a major deterrent. So I suppose one could state that given the comparatively high price of the CD32 at launch, 100k units over 6 months to a predominantly Amiga familiar consumer base is a non-negative outcome.

What was needed to save whole of Commodore however, is not just delaying the launch to get a few more CD32 kinks ironed out, rather a 5x - 10x of those sales figures which in the '80s and '90s console market is spurred by parents buying game consoles for pre-teen and early teen consumers. The same dynamic that moved over 1 million A500s.
This demographic is a lot more price sensitive. They don't care if the CD32 is cheaper than the 3DO. They care how much more expensive the CD32 is compared to SNES or Mega Drive (Genesis).

Last edited by agami on 18-Sep-2023 at 03:19 AM.
Last edited by agami on 18-Sep-2023 at 03:19 AM.
Last edited by agami on 18-Sep-2023 at 03:18 AM.

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How did one develop CD32 games at the time?

How did one develop games for any of the other consoles at the time?

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@agami

Quote:

What was needed to save whole of Commodore however, is not just delaying the launch to get a few more CD32 kinks ironed out, rather a 5x - 10x of those sales figures which in the '80s and '90s console market is spurred by parents buying game consoles for pre-teen and early teen consumers. The same dynamic that moved over 1 million A500s. This demographic is a lot more price sensitive. They don't care if the CD32 is cheaper than the 3DO. They care how much more expensive the CD32 is compared to SNES or Mega Drive (Genesis).

I see your point but I believe the biggest and basically insurmountable issue lied in the software (support)

Nintendo and Sega were backed by the biggest, most important publishers/developers of the industry. When Sony entered the console market many key supporters jumped ship, hence a non-trivial shift occurred that hurt badly the aforementioned giants but despite of this even Sega mostly kept a level of support that I'd argue not even the C64 could have ever dreamt of.

And for the sake of simplicity I'll just ignore the strenght of first party efforts (especially Nintendo at first, but Sony over the years has built a strong internal development department too) which are very often behind a platform success.

So, to keep my point as concise as possible: no matter the price of the CD32, I can't see how it could compete with Nintendo/Sega, and later Sony without being almost literally crushed.

Last edited by Turrican3 on 18-Sep-2023 at 10:38 AM.

@Turrican3

Your point is valid. While many argue that the CD32 launched with a potentially large library of quick AGA ports previously published for A1200 and A4000, those games were not going to make enough of a difference for non-Amiga gamers.

But an install base of ~1 million units would entice some developers to publish CD32 exclusive titles, or at least titles that make it stand out against the Nintendo and SEGA.

The coming PlayStation in 1995 would definitely have hurt the CD32, but with a year lead on the SEGA Saturn, the number of CD32s sold by end of 1995 could easily have been 1-2 million, compared to 400k for the Saturn.

That kind of install base is enough to buy a company some time to come up with a follow-up console, and launch in the N64 time frame. Also, a gaming centric expansion for the CD32 could've helped buy some more time. Then the follow-up to the CD32 can be shaped by the developers that made CD32 exclusives, and it's not simply a stripped-down A1200 with CD drive.

Commodore didn't need to beat SONY or Nintendo. The market proved that there's room for at least three major players. All C= had to do is be better than SEGA to hold onto the #3 spot.

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All the way, with 68k

@agami

I know hindsight etc. etc. but... I can't help but being frankly VERY skeptical.

After Sony the next player who entered the gaming console market was a company called Microsoft that I'm sure you've already heard of.

And it took a huge arrogance on Sony's part (plus some hefty investments to extend the warranty of a frankly embarassing, albeit interesting in terms of features, hardware design) to allow them to achieve the one and, to this date, only decent generation in terms of hardware sold, the Xbox 360.

I don't want to sound pedantic and/or repetitive, but as a person who's followed relatively closely (nothing too technical mind you, I'm just an old time, passionate player) this market for many decades now, it's really really difficult for me to envision a scenario where Commodore, with basically no ties at all with the key software publishers, could find its profitable niche when even a giant like Microsoft with all the "free" money coming from their Windows segment hasn't been able to.

Last edited by Turrican3 on 18-Sep-2023 at 02:05 PM.
Last edited by Turrican3 on 18-Sep-2023 at 12:51 PM.
Last edited by Turrican3 on 18-Sep-2023 at 12:51 PM.