why usa never liked the amiga ???

[turrican3]

What happened in usa in the 80's ? The amiga was the best computer and it sold so bad in usa !!! why ??? If someone could help me to understand ???!!

[watsonfmly]

Marketing. When I saw my first Amiga, I sold my IBM PS/2 model 30 the next day to buy one. I loved it so much, I started working for the store during High school. In my opinion if more people knew what was possible, it would have been a different story.

[Gzegzolka]

I do not know. I wonder what commodore done bad in marketing?

[JimDrew]

I wasn't aware that the Amiga sold poorly in the U.S. The numbers I saw from Commodore clearly showed the U.S. was biggest single market. I got to see total numbers when I was negotiating with John Dululo for the A4000E, which was an A4000 with my EMPLANT board.

[Galahad/FLT]

Sorry Jim, but I don't think thats true at all. Biggest single markets were the UK and Germany, France and a conglomerate of the Scandinavian countries.

Problem for people is that the Amiga was eventually accepted as a games machine by Commodore, and the Americans were rather different in what they wanted.

The NES was king over there, cartridge format for instant loading, cartridge consoles was how a games machine was perceived it should be.

In the rest of Europe however, home computers were the norm, we'd already done the cartridge thing with the Atari VCS, and for many people the cost of games was far too prohibitive.

I remember being very young and cartridges were over £30 each, which back in the late 70's/early 80's was a massive amount of money for a game.

Compare that to a C64 title that was less than £10, and the vast budget ranges that were cheaper still.

So when it was time for the C64 and Spectrums to be put away, the Amiga was the next logical step, as well as the Atari ST.

In America, the next logical step was an evolution of what they already had which was NES to SNES.

[Lobotomika]

They were too busy enjoying their horrible looking NES color palette.

Growing up, going to computer shows, I never so much as saw an amiga myself. All the computers were "IBM Compatible" and that was all the rage. Perhaps it's because IBM (and the software on top, MS-DOS) were American companies, as well as Apple. I did see a lot of Apple computers but mainly at school.

As far as gaming, the NES dominated, followed by Genesis and SNES. Other than that, nobody was able to break into the market. We were...obsessed with Mario and Sonic over here.

[gazj82]

I guess the US might have been the biggest in sheer numbers of units sold, but probably not per percentage of population share or home computer market share.

[Jgames]

I was in the usa for a 3 months trip in 1989. Have been to quite a lot of supermarkets, the only games I have seen were the Atari 2600 games in huge quantities, and also a lot of toys (GI Joe, thundercats, etc...).

The only computer with nice graphics I saw was the Atari st.

Coming back, I always tought that in planet earth, there was only Atari 2600, and Atari st computers. (I was a kid back then).

[ajk]

@esc

Commodore was an American company too, though... (for all practical purposes at least)

[hansel75]

Wow Turri, you must hold the record for most amount of threads started on EAB!

And on the subject of the Amiga in the USA, i thought the high end Amiga's were supposed to be popular in the 90's over there, with there toasters for budget tv productions and rendering farms for lightwave.
While the rest of the world mostly bought the low end Amiga's mainly for entertainment purposes.

But to say the USA never liked the Amiga, that's simple incorrect.
It may not of beaten the pc and nes etc, but it had it's place in every country
And i highly doubt that there were many US Amiga owners that didn't like there Amiga at the time..

[pandy71]

My 2 cents is that Commodore was not able to compete with Apple and IBM - US market was polarized by those 2 distant philosophies - finance/engineering IBM PC vs artists/lawyers on Macintosh - also Commodore didn't realize Amiga potential almost till own end... Multimedia - real multimedia HW is available form how long - few years, perhaps 10 - Amiga was to early.

[Retro-Nerd]

The Amiga 1000 was quite popular for a short time in the USA. I bet this model had the best sales there. For the rest: Everything what Galahad said is true.

the is an excellent article that describe the sales of computer
http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/1/
C64 was the number one in 1984, i think the market leader of C64 was the USA
a Tramiel success story

after it was always PC

my conclusion ...
if Tramiel keeped his place in Commodore or bought Amiga with Atari ...

in France for example the amiga market was poored in comparaison with UK, Germany and Italy
i never understood why ... perhaps the frenchs are like americans but they don't want anyone know
)

after 1991 the french economy was in recession,
it coincided with the vanishing of many Video game companies of France
like Cinemaware in USA...
)

[turrican3]

The atari st sold more unit in usa ??
Poor marketing ??? I don't know, there is a publicity for the usa : [ Show youtube player ]
And one for the france, that i never saw before : [ Show youtube player ]
I found the french publicity very bad, because it shows nothing about the amiga capacity, it explains nothing... I'm sure this publicity was a loose of time and money !
The american one seems good to me... but how much time they made marketing ??? i really don't know.
I remember well the sega publicity on tv when i was young but i have no one about the amiga... Even more bad when i bought my amiga i didn't know this computer existed, i had an atari st at this periode of time, hopefully i went to a friend and he shows me the amiga !!!! what a slap, the animation was really better and the music !!!!! Everything in the amiga was better like i wasn't a musician.

[watsonfmly]

It wasn't aired a lot. I was working in the Amiga shop when it did (just before Christmas). Our sales SKY ROCKETED. Once Christmas was over, they quit showing it, and our sales went back down.

[dlfrsilver]

Americans got the IBM PC which was the leader on the market (companies and families).
The amiga only got a small part of the market.....

[Paul_s]

different markets (I wonder just how well the Amiga did in Japan??)
lack of marketing (the UK division did well)

[Nibbler]

IBM & MS had the USA in a STRANGLEHOLD !!!!

[watsonfmly]

I remember seeing Windows floppy disks at a friends house (he was using them for blanks, it must have been 1.0). I asked "what is that", he said "it's like Workbench for a PC".

Btw, I had an IBM PS/2 model 30. As soon as I saw an Amiga (playing the Newtek demo), I sold my IBM and bought an Amiga 500. That was the best decision I ever made.