What was the Greatest Launch Title of all Time?

[Bofferbrauer2]

HoloDust said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

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.

I thought most ZX sold before 1985, so I didn't include it.

I kinda agree with you on Amiga and Atari ST, as they were in a tough spot. They were cheaper than PC, though not as versatile, and if you equipped them properly for work an actual PC was mostly cheaper. On the other hand, consoles were still cheaper than them, though the games were more expensive. And like I said, the PC got constantly improved, and neither the Amiga or the Atari ST/TT/Falcon could nearly keep up with it, which is also partly due to the Motorola X68000 processors simply reaching their limits, but mostly because Commodore and Atari forgot to upgrade the graphical qualities accordingly. AGA was clearly a lot better than OCS, but in the meanwhile most PCs shipped with VGA graphics cards and SVGA was about to launch, thus having only HAM over PC and the rest was worse than SVGA or what consoles could deliver by then in every way.

So yeah, those got squashed left and right by both PC and consoles. But that didn't kill computer gaming in itself in the slightest.