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Bofferbrauer2 said:
Wyrdness said:

What you've posted here doesn't debunk what I've said in fact it further highlights it as look at the numbers for a start outside of the C64 the home computers were outperformed by the new consoles in Europe and this was a time when they were meant to be on top in fact your WW numbers show that the console numbers in Europe were significantly higher than the HC's WW numbers if we go by WW numbers than it further shows what I've said. This is why Atari tried to realign with consoles because their time had come to an end and it took until the late 90s for PCs to reinstate that side of the market but they were still being dominated by consoles as gaming goes it's only later on in 00s when the market found itself as a mainstay again.

I showed WW numbers because I couldn't find European-only numbers in most cases. The Amiga stands at 4.2M in Europe only, the Amstrad is almost all European numbers, same for the Atari ST. That's already 9M just for those 3 platforms in Europe. While that's less than 14M, they are just a part from the European market. A small part, I might add.

Atari tried to realign to consoles because the Atari ST flopped compared to the main competitor, the Amiga - just look at the sales numbers I provided. Plus, it was very frontloaded (half of it's sales were done by 1988 while the Amiga peaked in 1991). It just couldn't keep up with the competition in the computer field. What's more, the ST was bleeding money. They tried to address this with the Falcon, but when it failed, they axed the entire Computer line in favor of the Jaguar, hoping it would have worldwide appeal, not just in Europe.

Also, if the Consoles would have killed the computers, then why did Atari kill it's 7800 successor, the Atari Panther, planned to release in 1991, early in development, resulting them to leave the console market for 2 years after they pulled the 7800 in 1992?

Your conclusion is just biased and slanted. I could prove just as well that consoles were a flop by comparing Amiga sales in Europe to PC their Engine sales and declare that consoles couldn't catch on in Europe. Out of those 158M

Finally, PC sales exploded in the early 90's. Out of those 158M, over 60 were just from 1993-1994, at a time when most companies already had computers. Why? Well, because some little game called Doom, that's why. Id Software at the time made $100,000 daily just from the sales of the $9 shareware episode unlocks. In other words, they sold over 10k games on a daily basis. The game was played by 10M people within 2 years of it's launch. Other games also put the PC into the frontlight, like the Monkey Island Series, Civilization II

Now tell me, how can a game sell 10M copies if the platform is dead?

You forgot 5mil that ZX Spectrum sold. And that's pretty much all Europe. ;)

But ultimatelly, I would say as well that consoles did kill computers - at least for brief period of time and "gaming" computers of 80s specifically. While early 80s models (C64, ZX and 464 in particular) sold fairly well, what came after those models, although more than good enough to compete with consoles, due to price and rising popularity of consoles eventually couldn't get anywhere near numbers of their predecessors. Actually Amiga was only 16-bit computer that had any decent success vs SNES/SMD...but at much higher cost than say C64 vs NES/SMS.

On the other hand you're right as well. PC started to explode around '85, not as gaming machines though, but they were on constant momentum, rising in sales YoY quite a bit. I loved my Amiga 500, but when 1200 eventually launched in 92, it was too little, too late compared to PCs which were already at their i486 and VGA standard - I remember this vividly, I was kinda curious about A1200, but that year first seeing Wolfenstein 3D and then Commanche Maximum Overkill on my friend's PC showed me everything I needed to know about where the future of computer gaming is.