Why did the CD32 fail?

[wanderer]

Why?

[CodyJarrett]

Where's the option for "Nearly all of the above"?

[wanderer]

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

Where's the option for "Nearly all of the above"?

True, but let's stick to the "closest match" answer. I could have enabled "allow multiple voting" but it would be a mess, since most of the answers are vaild.

[icewizard2k5]

shouldnt of made it a poll

who ever gave a crap about "no full motion video"?

besides the fact that its ugly what did the cd32 really offer? nothing.
it was just another amiga with the same games.

imo i think its failure was just linked to being part of Commodore's Amiga story.

[Miggy2TheMax]

anything that you can ship out earlier the better and with the CD32 it was all too little too late. so I put down "too late for commodore...." But now that I look at the results their crappy marketing was a big player too... geezz so many options to choose from.. where to start

[Rebel-CD32]

The main reason was the lack of CD32 exclusive games. Only a few games came out on the CD32 ONLY. From memory, these were Microcosm and Flink, maybe a few others. Later on, a few Amiga CD games came out that worked on any AGA CD system.

The rest of the games were straight A500/A1200 ports with no enhancements other than the occasional CD music or animated intro, many of them were still ECS and ran in a framed screen, the CD32 could easily handle full 320x256 screen modes with any type of game, no need to stick to smaller screens because the A500 couldn't handle bigger.

One of the better games ported from the Amiga to the CD32 was Ultimate Body Blows... at least we got the AGA graphics, CD music, and ALL of the characters and backgrounds from two big fighting games mashed up into one. That was good value compared to some of the other Amiga-CD32 games. They could have at least added a jump button to all these A500 platformers that came out on the CD32, instead of sticking to the "up is jump" for one-button A500 joysticks. A jump (or accelerate) button is much easier on a pad than pressing up.

If you read through the old magazines from 93-95, a LOT of games were planned to be released on the CD32 that made use of the CD format, AGA graphics, Akiko chip and seven-button controllers, but alas, they never saw the light of day.

Commodore's marketing wasn't too bad, they did advertise it well in Europe when it first came out, with that cool TV ad with the robot, and the big billboard outside Sega HQ, full-page ads in video game magazines and stuff. It was just the lack of special games that stopped people from buying it, and therefor developing for it.

[StarEye]

Expensive, ugly, useless, and generally a bad machine. The games they had were already on the amiga, and about only 0,1% of the games were exclusive to the CD32 vs the normal Amiga. Microcosm? Flink? Flink looked like a decent game, but I've yet to play it thoroughly. But one game isn't enough for a console to be succesfull, unless it's called Mario or Sonic.

[alexh]

Mainly because the hardware was rubbish. The CD32 Launch date was September 1993... but rumours within the game developer community were already going round about the two upcoming superconsoles from Sega & Nintendo. By Feb 1994 developers had Saturn Devkits.

If it had an extra custom chip for textured triangle rasterisation, and an FPU then it may have done better.... it could only just compete with the likes of the Megadrive and the SNES and was set to be outclassed by the Saturn and PS

[icewizard2k5]

afaik Flink wasn't exclusive to cd32. 99% sure it was on genesis

[Amiga1992]

No exclusive games
Because no one would code for the machine
Because the Amiga was already dying.

Oh and it looked like cheap shit!

The hardware wa NOT rubbish at all, I beg to differ. It would have been crushed by the PSX anyway, ut rubbish? pah

Bad timing/marjeting, as always, Commodore!

[DrBong]

Commodore was pretty much on its knees financially when they released the CD32 (the CD32 was their last hope!). The lack of money meant that they couldn't give the CD32 the release it deserved. That is:

- lavish worldwide marketing

- commissioning "killer" games exclusive to CD32 and having them ready at release (there were only about 6 games ready at release and 2 of them were the ones bundled with the console)

- generous support for 3rd party developers

- delayed U.S. release (3DO and Atari Jaguar were already available in the 2nd half of 1993 when the CD32 was released in Europe; the U.S. had to wait until the 1st half of 1994 for the release of CD32 and by then Commodore knew they were well and truly screwed because European sales weren't going to be enough to save them from bankruptcy)

- delayed release of FMV module (should have been ready closer to release, but probably more important for markets where they were competing with 3DO)

Also, there may have been a shortage of CD32s available for sale in the UK leading up to Christmas in 1993, which wouldn't have helped C='s cause if that was the case (my memory's fuzzy on this one!).

Anyway, it would probably have all been academic if C= had of been able to give the CD32 a more deserving release (and didn't go bankrupt). Sony would have cleaned them up with the PSX.

[BlaCkAdDa]

They marketed to the existing amiga community but then offered them very little that they didn't already have.

That was the problem.

oh and it was expensive for a console too!

[tin]

err isn't it accepted that commodore failed because they needed to make 300,000 to drag themselves out of debt and only managed to make 100,00 before the banks forclosed on them?

AFAIK it was an (inexplicable) success, they just physcially couldn't make enough of em to sell enough to profit.

I might have got the figures wrong but I am pretty sure on the substance.

Poor Commodore marketing

Above all, yeah. They had to push it more & release it earlier & make a better design.

[Fred the Fop]

Originally Posted by Rebel-CD32

The main reason was the lack of CD32 exclusive games. Only a few games came out on the CD32 ONLY. From memory, these were Microcosm and Flink.........

Microcosm made it to the Mega CD and 3DO.

[wanderer]

Originally Posted by Fred the Duck

Microcosm made it to the Mega CD and 3DO.

And Philps CD-I too, with FMV support. Never played it, but it must have been much more impressive than the CD32 version.

[wanderer]

CD-I was cool.

[EmuChicken]

ooops, I clicked the wrong button

Does anyone know where I can get them old ads from ? :-) I wanna see em!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by DrBong

- commissioning "killer" games exclusive to CD32 and having them ready at release

This tactic was not that used back then, not as it is now, was it? Most of this happened with in-house productions (Mario, Sonic) and Commodore obviously didn't have an in-jouse programming dept., at least not then.

[utri007]

CD32 didn't actually failed it sold quite well.

Launched in Europe during 1993 it quickly grabbed a large portion of the prototypical CD market, even beating PC CD-ROM. It's US success was also cut short when the U.S. government declared that Commodore could not bring anything into the country, as they had not paid the $10 million they owed for the XOR patent infringement lawsuit. The last ditch attempt to save the company failed and Commodore entered bankruptcy on April 29th 1994. The unshipped Amiga CD32 units were were seized by the Philippine government as payment for the use of their factory.

Although these events killed the CD32 as a viable platform it remained popular for several years, demonstrating a demand for Amiga CD titles. In 1994 a third party developer launched the SX-1 and SX32, allowing owners to turn their rejected console into a fully fledged Amiga