[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Nope, Atari were mainly the reason why the Falcon failed.

By the time the Falcon was released, the majority of software publishers and developers had already stopped writing software for the Atari ST/e computers, and to compound the misery, those same developers would have known about the Falcon before they stopped writing for the ST, so even its imminent arrival wasn't about to contribute in any meaningful way.

One reason i heard about the publishers was that they never forgave Atari what they did with the Power Packs they gave with the ST/F/M/E computers.
Those were retail games with retail games, and Atari gave them with their computers at ridiculous prices. So when the Falcon was launched, they said in substance "We will see if Atari sell thousands of Atari Falcon, but until now, we won't do anything on it". I think they heard or knew about Atari Difficulties to provide Falcon computers (each Atari subsidiary in each euro countries were fighting to get them).

[quote]The price for the base Falcon was also another problem, sure the base Falcon was more powerful than a base A1200, the base Falcon was significantly more expensive than an A1200, and getting awfully close to a PC for price.|/quote]

This and the fact that Falcons are in fact prototype machines (if you refer to Atari industrial coding for the serial numbers), not finalized computers.

The A1200 was also released at the height of the Amiga 500's success, and pretty much EVERY publisher were onboard with supporting the A1200 from the start, the Falcon had Cubase make some press releases and Imagitec said they were working on some demos.

Basically what i said. Publishers had the sales numbers : more amiga in the wild, and more sales of softwares.

The A1200 certainly had some effect on the Falcon, I was one of those considering buying a Falcon when it was announced, but was put off immediately by the price point and that there wasn't going to be any killer software for it that made it an essential purchase.

The public didn't know what to do with such a computer. Only original Atari owners bought this computer in the end.

But the main reason was Atari, at that price point, software publishers likely wrote it off instantly suggesting not many would be sold, there were far more Archimedes computers in existence and they didn't write software for that either, so that gives you an idea of just how successful devs and publishers thought it was going to be.

Very good point. Publishers were not keen to do Archimedes dev (too few machines, even less than Atari ST anyway).

I think it was only places like France where the ST was a better seller than the Amiga that got any traction as the French devs and publishers thought that the Falcon would be the natural upgrade progression for those ST owners, hence the likes of Silmarils and other French publishers supporting Falcon initially.

A little remark regarding this fact : There were more Atari computers sold in France, with less Amiga, but the very funny fact is that more softwares were sold on Amiga than on Atari ST !

Silmarils were in the end the only publisher with Imagitec design to do commercial games on the Falcon 030.