Full Force get busy one time! ("Hello viewers")
In the month that Amiga Power closed its mighty oaken doors for the final
time, I've decided to examine the view of the endearing Amiga-game diehards
who maintain the machine isn't dead.
I'm bored of lists.
You see, there are those (and there are more of them than you'd like to
think) who claim the Amiga's still a viable format and that it's rubbished
because it's not trendy and cool.
Like the PC presumably.
They say that if only the software houses would develop Amiga games, they'd
still sell by the truckload and life would be a big bowl of fish.
I wonder if the figures back them up...
Let's start by taking a look at the ordinary A500 chart. How many copies a
month do you imagine a top 10 Amiga game would shift these days? 5,000?
10,000? 20,000?
Or something like 332 which is coincidentally the number of copies Premier
Manager 3 sold this July, while it held down the Amiga No5 position?
Too low down? Let's go right up to No2 where we can find Worms.
Specifically, 526 copies of worms.
"Ah, but the A1200's where it's really at," the whine, "Everyone's got one."
The best selling A1200 game in the world in July was popular Mario Kart
clone Xtreme Racing. No fewer than 296 people crammed through the doors of
software shops nationwide for a copy.
A little further down the chart we encounter snazzy Doom clone Gloom frmo
the most prolific Amiga developers around, Guidhall, who'll be retiring
soon on the profits from 188 sales.
"But it's hardly fair judging sales from one summer month's figures alone!
What about total sales? Why, I read in several magazines that Amiga Worms
has sold over 100,000 copies for example."
Well, no. The official figure for total sales of Worms on all floppy-disk
formats put together is currently 35,757. That includes PC sales, currently
making up 45% of the total.
Which would seem to make total Amiga sales of Worms more like 19,966. Oops.
If you read any of the Amiga newsgroups on Usenet, you'd believe that
every Amiga owner out there had an A4000 with 32Mb and an A3600 accelerator
board, providing a huge potential for sales.
The fact that the entire A1200 Top 10 put together sold just 1,437 games
last month rather blows that idea, though.
And even with the average budget game costing a fiver, or even less, the
Amiga budget chart can't muster a single game selling in four figures.
All of these figures are the official Chart-Track/ELSPA stats, which,
while not covering every single game shop in the world, do account for
nearly 80% of them. So it's pretty conclusive.
The Amiga is dead. And while there are many people to blame for that to one
degree or another, it's mostly dead because no-one's buying Amiga games
anymore. This means you, Amiga owners.
It wasn't a conspiracy. It was you. So shut up about it, alright?
Welcome