The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.

I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical.

Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.

The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.

Piracy made Amiga cheaper. SNES and two cartridges/Genesis with three was more expensive than Amiga 500.

$100 < $200

A console without games isn’t useful.

And a printer without ink doesn’t print. Yet we all continue to fall for this initial low price bait.

In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one.

In 1996 the first hit became free.

Video rental was huge. It's the only way I could afford to play games.

In 1985? That didn’t take off where I was until PS1 days.

Oh yea, 1985-1987 is when a lot of the VHS places started stocking video games.

It’s the only way I was able to play. My best friend across the street had the console and I didn’t (I had Atari 2600). So I would rent and we would play together. I eventually got my own in maybe 1987-1988.

PS1 kicked off in 1995 and we had rentals for a long time by that point. I never owned a PS1 but same friend did. I ended up going from NES, SNES, N64 before switching mostly to PC games and eventually went to college where video games took a back seat for a number of years

Mostly play Xbox now (short while I had PSP)

Interesting, of the 3 rental places near me only one started carrying video games in 1994 with the others soon following.

This is in Florida too and not a major metropolitan area. I just assumed it was everywhere

Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which were around long before games consoles became mainstream.