Speaking of AGA, why were so few AGA licensed conversions produced?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Pretty well if i were to hazard a guess, didn’t MK2 sell 100k on the Amiga?

I don't know Would be great if we could gather sources for game sales on the Amiga somewhere as it might explain a bit more about the era between 1991 and 1994.

[Tigerskunk]

too little too late - people have moved on.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

too little too late - people have moved on.

Yes that's why we're all here making one "what if" post after the other, because we moved on.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Yes that's why we're all here making one "what if" post after the other, because we moved on.

Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out then

[logo]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Not everybody had £400 to spend on a new system

Yes. Some of them couldn't afford it.
Many others wanted a brand new A1200 for the same cost of an end of life A500. Of course, it wasn't possible.
Most of them had enough money to buy a twice more expensive PC a few months later...

[gimbal]

conversationally, I ran into this video about 25 cancelled Amiga games.

[ Show youtube player ]

Quite some 1200/CD32 gems in there. And to my shock and horror there was a game called Stargunner published by Apogee which according to this video they wanted to publish for the Amiga first. That blows my mind, an Apogee game could have actually not only existed on the Amiga, but originated there. Alas it was not meant to be.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by gimbal

conversationally, I ran into this video about 25 cancelled Amiga games.

[ Show youtube player ]

Quite some 1200/CD32 gems in there. And to my shock and horror there was a game called Stargunner published by Apogee which according to this video they wanted to publish for the Amiga first. That blows my mind, an Apogee game could have actually not only existed on the Amiga, but originated there. Alas it was not meant to be.

You have more detail about the relation between Amiga and Apogee, and this game, here :
https://web.archive.org/web/20141110...classic_games/

[BigD]

Originally Posted by TEG

And there was the lack of effective copy protection systems for the Amiga. Consoles used cartridges and PC games were using CD-ROM which were not so easy to copy at the beginning if I remember well.

CD32 and Amiga CD-Rom were there and the CDTV created the early platform for the transition but Gould refused to pivot and then the A600 was developed! IDE port and PCMCIA slot were great but a CD-Rom and AGA were required and a year earlier!

[BigD]

Originally Posted by logo

Yes. Some of them couldn't afford it.
Many others wanted a brand new A1200 for the same cost of an end of life A500. Of course, it wasn't possible.
Most of them had enough money to buy a twice more expensive PC a few months later...

The ones that moaned about the price blew the money on cigarettes, drink or worse then bought a NES completely obsolete on release with games that cost three times what Amiga games cost!

An AGA Amiga 3000+ with DSP would have got the market excited then C= could release the A1200 with built in CD-Rom bundle as an option in 1991/92 and cemented that market with the CD32 in Christmas 92!

[Megalomaniac]

The A600 as a replacement for the 500+ was probably a mistake, but Christmas 1992 was still early enough to launch the A1200, which was more powerful in most areas than the SNES, and easily a match for low-end PCs.

The cigarettes and alcohol ranting sounds self-righteous and smug, and sadly reinforces the stereotype that anyone into videogames back then was either a child or a socially-inept nerd. People who got Spectrums or C64s or VCSs as kids were now in the age range where that stuff was available. Was the NES really aiming at the same market as the Amiga, let alone the A1200, and precisely which NES games cost anywhere near £75?

[sokolovic]

Don't know for the UK but I clearly remember that NES games were priced between 390/490 francs while Amiga games 200/250Francs. Of course some Amiga games were more expansive, generally the serious one with loads of manual and disk aiming at serious people, but non more than 300 francs. for the record SF2 was released at 650 francs on the SNES.
But I agree with you, NES and A1200 weren't sharing any market IMO (or a little share of their respectives marketed).
I'd say that the A1200 was aimed for older teens and young adults. I won't be surprised that the HD version was pretty common for the A1200.

[TCD]

Maybe he means the SNES? Games were around 80 DM for the A1200 and around 120 DM for the SNES in 1992/93 here in Germany.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Well I suppose they assumed A1200 would fail, same as most of the biggest developers assumed Jaguar would fail.

I know Magnetic Fields left the Amiga to move onto PC DOS (a rally game was first IIRC) and of course people like Reflections did some early PS1 games so clearly they got their name down for a 1993 PS1 dev kit and got on with that.

Maybe Commodore really didn't give the publishers and developers any sort of advance warning the 'secret' A1200 was coming and by the time it did they didn't care. Maybe there was bugger all support for developers, maybe Commodore did a terrible job courting publishers to support the new 256 colour chipset.

But it's worth remembering it took Commodore years to sell 1 million Amigas, not Amiga 500 units but Amigas in total.

It was just weird that games would come out and few of the big publishers were doing anything with AGA so you felt a bit let down as an early A1200 owner. Not quite as bad as CDTV vs the big publishers but still it didn't feel optimistic even in 1992.

At least in 1986 I could have played two awesome Amiga 1000 games and that machine was hard to find let alone the fact people couldn't afford it in most parts of the world as their next home computer. Felt like Amiga had already been abandoned. Like I said it was just a weird time thinking about it now. Great for non gaming stuff the machine now allowed me to do that I couldn't before though.

Imagine how many years it took for Atari to sell 3 millions of their computers on the globe

[Megalomaniac]

SNES Street Fighter 2 was £65 here (but, much as I denied it at the time, well worth it - did I really think Body Blows was just as good?), compared to £26 for most Amiga action games (and £30-£35 for most sims/adventure/strategy (bigger manuals, more disks, and I think longer development time as a rule), up to £38 for Monkey Island 2), so still not quite three times as much but getting closer.

At least in Europe, the A1200 was still growing when Commodore died - in the UK Amiga games were outselling anything else by number in mid-1994, and CD32 games were outselling other CD-based systems - and a lot of promising-looking stuff was cancelled after Commodore collapsed and there were no Amigas on the shelf for Christmas 1994 - so it might have got some more big names (though clearly anything designed for the Playstation or Saturn couldn't be done on a stock A1200 to any quality)

[sokolovic]

Yes. I remember a coverage of an event in UK (ECTS probably) by french magazine Joystick a couple of month before Commodore collapse. They were saying that the Amiga and the A1200 were still going strong there with many support from all major publishers and many games announced for every Amiga supports.
Since this magazine was slowly going all PC, it was nearly a disappointment for them.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

SNES Street Fighter 2 was £65 here (but, much as I denied it at the time, well worth it - did I really think Body Blows was just as good?), compared to £26 for most Amiga action games (and £30-£35 for most sims/adventure/strategy (bigger manuals, more disks, and I think longer development time as a rule), up to £38 for Monkey Island 2), so still not quite three times as much but getting closer.

At least in Europe, the A1200 was still growing when Commodore died - in the UK Amiga games were outselling anything else by number in mid-1994, and CD32 games were outselling other CD-based systems - and a lot of promising-looking stuff was cancelled after Commodore collapsed and there were no Amigas on the shelf for Christmas 1994 - so it might have got some more big names (though clearly anything designed for the Playstation or Saturn couldn't be done on a stock A1200 to any quality)

Yeah SNES games were way overpriced, well Nintendo games always were, NES, N64 way above anything else price wise, but console game prices were part of the reason i swapped my Mega Drive for an A500, could only afford to rent games.

Btw yes CD32 was outselling every other CD format in the UK, but the Amiga was not top by 1994, probably a year earlier, but it was still a respectable 2nd place in mid 1994 despite all the ‘the Amiga died in 1991, 1992, 1993 etc etc!’

Found this UK Gallup games market share for software sales April 1994:

Mega Drive - 25.4%
Amiga - 19.6%
SNES - 13%
PC - 12.3%
Gameboy - 7.7%
Master System - 4.6%
NES - 4%
Game Gear - 3.9%
CD32 - 2%
Atari ST - 1.6%
Mega CD - 1.4%

Anything else was less than 1%

[TCD]

Interesting data. Quite different to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_i...ited_Kingdom_2

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Interesting data. Quite different to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_i...ited_Kingdom_2

Well that's just the top selling title for each month, which could fit within the data above, of course that is just HMV too whilst Gallup covers alot more stores across the UK.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by TCD

Interesting data. Quite different to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_i...ited_Kingdom_2

Just because one individual Amiga game wasn't topping the monthly lists doesn't mean that Amiga games in general weren't still selling well in total. Remember how many more Amiga games there were than Megadrive or SNES. Still selling 50% more than PC games here at that time (I assume that counts both PC CD-ROM and floppies, though it'd still be ahead even if not). Striking that the Gameboy was selling twice as many games as the technically-superior Game Gear. And that the ST still registered a glimmer, I guess because what few games they were still getting were mostly big names from other systems like Zool and Cannon Fodder.

[sokolovic]

Plus it is a bit confusing. One month you have one game on one system on top and the other you have one game in several systems (septembre 1994, MK2 is on top with 5 systems !). Doesn't seem very scrupulous.