https://www.vgchartz.com/article/453918/intellivision-hit-with-layoffs-as-it-tries-to-save-its-amico-console/

I was just going to leave a post on the article, but it started turning into a long rant.  So, I opted to post a thread instead.

"CEO Phil Adam says the company has taken drastic steps by laying off staff in order to save money, as well as licensing out its IP."

First off, how many employees does Intellivision Entertainment even have?  How many people got laid off?  Will laying off those employees actually have any effect on "saving" the Amico?  Or did IE just not have money to continue paying their staff in the first place and would be laying them off whether the Amico gets permanently shelved or not.  This reads as spin to me.  If the higher ups in IE had as much passion for the Amico as they project publicly, then the highest paid execs in the company would either have not taken a salary, or would have taken a massively reduced salary, until actual physical Amicos were being manufactured and sold.  You see start up CEO's do this all the time when they really have a passion for whether their business makes it or not.  Meanwhile, IE somehow instead managed to accumulate 9.5 million dollars in debt without producing a single unit for sale.  Compare that to Atari, who for all the delays and poor communication throughout the project, actually did manage to get their VCS onto the market with the 3 million dollars they raised from their Indiegogo campaign.  IE boasted numerous times that they would "never resort to the crowd-funding route".  Yet, they used several rounds of "investor campaigns" to raise 3 times that amount and not a single pre-order has been shipped.  At least everyone who backed the Atari VCS eventually got one, whether they were happy with the finished product or not.  At this time, it's not even clear if Amico backers who are already asking for refunds will even see their deposits back.

And, what IP's does Intellivision have to leverage in order to raise enough money to manufacture and ship the Amico?  They had to change the name of the successor to one of their most popular Intellivision games to "Cloudy Mountain", because they can't afford a license to use the Dungeons & Dragons name anymore.  Are there really corporations clamoring to license "Shark! Shark!" ?  I don't see it.  

Also, the pandemic is frequently cited as the reason for why the Amico did not release on time.  But, if you take an honest look at IE's development process for this console, the Amico was never going to release on 10/10/2020.  So many things would have already needed to be in place before the lockdowns set in that clearly weren't.  The games weren't finished, and the console was nowhere near ready for production, so the few months between the start of the Covid-19 outbreak and the planned October launch date would not have magically changed that.  This is a vanity project that has been completely mismanaged.  IE somehow "lost" $1.35m paid to Ark Electronics USA.  And even if the Amico makes it to market, IE has to pay $100 per console on a horribly negotiated $810,000 loan from angel investment advisor Sudesh Aggarwal.  So, IE has already agreed to lose $100 on the first 8,000 Amico's sold.  That's the majority of their initial 10,000 pre-orders.  None of this points to a company that was ever competent enough to release a console on time.  This is a company that has sold boxes with RFID cards in them for games that might not even be completed yet.  This is a company that showed off games containing text from Nintendo's Star Fox and art from World of Tanks which they said was "placeholder" material, while claiming that it's common for devs to that during development.  Sure.  Nintendo gets caught all the time using text from Halo and art from Red Dead Redemption as placeholder material in it's teaser trailers for Breath of the Wild.

I don't see any of these recent moves (layoffs, IP licenses) getting the Amico any closer to a release than IE's previous disastrous rounds of loans/"investments" have done.

Maybe they should ask a Saudi Prince for some money?

History repeating itself

Maybe Microsoft or Tencent could come to the rescue. 

Yeah, I'd say the Amico is pretty much DOA at this point. It was Tallarico wanting to flex his muscles, and his defensiveness around the project was when I knew things were really going south. 

Switch releases of Astrosmash, Cloudy Mountain, and Earthworm Jim 4 confirmed. Wouldn't be surprised if EWJ4 actually got worse reception than EWJ3D.

Not ideal, but the market has such fierce competition from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo that it's honestly super difficult to break into it.
It's all locked down... Which is why seeing attempts from Atari, Ouya, Intellivision and more just fail to gain traction, even if they legitimately had some novel ideas.

It was a scam on day one just because Tommy started the thing. Tommy is a pathological liar and surrounded himself with other liars and yes men. The CEO that took over from Tommy...is a scam artist who did the Coleco Chameleon. It was a shitty idea and used a dated concept. Amico doesn't actually exist as a product.

EWj4 doesn't exist and never will. The project never started and never will. Tommy just lies constantly.

This flat-out wasn't a good idea. Tallarico was ultimately marketing this to himself, to a market that doesn't really exist. None of those other machines were good ideas, either.

That doesn't mean you're wrong on the rest of it. Sega, for instance, would have a tough time breaking back into the market, even with a strong financial backer, a full-throated tech push to at least give it parity with the Switch that it can't really afford without said financial backing, and Sonic to help sell the system. The Amico was a complete disaster. Nothing could have saved it.

Well. Even Microsoft struggled initially... It cost them 10's of billions to break into the market, which is pretty difficult for smaller companies these days, even if they line up a plethora of content deals.

Agree.  And asking families to plunk down $249 up front just for a system that could handle these types of games was a horrible ask.  The initial reveal in 2017 had the price point expected to be $149-$179.  Which would have actually positioned it in a good place to be a holiday impulse buy for families.  But by April 2020, the price had suddenly ballooned to $249 for white Amico and $279 for woodgrain.  Which at that point, you're asking for more than a Switch Lite costs, and might as well consider a standard Switch or XBox Series S.  The inflated costs makes more sense when you factor in that $100 off each of the first 8,000 console sales needed to go directly to paying back an $810,000 loan.

Amico supporters would lash out when the games shown off were said to be "mobile game quality".  But some of the games being featured as Amico games, already existed on mobile.  It was extremely ironic to watch people say they were excited to get a $249 Amico so that they could then buy a $9.99 download of an Evel Knievel game, which already existed as a $1.99 app on their phone since 2015.  Where was all this excitement for the same Evel Knievel game over half a decade ago?