I think fxgogo hit the nail on the head. In addition I'd stress everything has to be viewed in shades of gray and not be so black and white all of the time. There is certainly regional revisionist history out there, no doubt about it, but the regional markets were stronger and larger
at different times.
just another regional peripheral maker doing best in its home territory.
It's extremely hard for me to think of GVP as "just another regional peripheral maker." If you look at their portfolio and the years products shipped, GVP was one of the largest and most impressive out there. Maybe I have my USA-glasses on. But paraphrasing fxgogo, the
professional Amiga market in the US was
real. The
A500 sold well here in the late 1980s and very early 90s in the personal computer markets, too, and GVP took advantage of that. But the Amiga was simply nothing like the C64 and that’s because the C64 was for a time the most impressive AND affordable option out there. It was the best-selling computer of all time for a reason, and that included its enormous footprint in the US and Canada. (I say "US" a lot, but really I mean North America, which of course includes the huge Canadian market as well.) The home computer market in the UK and Europe was real, too, of course. And in some countries (I'm looking at you, Poland) the C64 lived well beyond its years while the Amiga was actually quite rare due to regional economics at the time.
This is how I look at it and I think the GVP sales charts support some of my thinking:
Commodore - in particular the C64 8-bits - was King in North America for several years during the 1980s. The C128 also sold more units here than anywhere else in the world in pure numbers, but overall it was a failure. The dominance of C= 8-bits began to shift and the messaging "got really muddy" by the time the Amiga 500 shipped in 1987. I was still a C64 user at that time, personally, as I came from a single-parent lower-income household. For us the A500 was simply out of our league in 1987. But that's beside the point.
Commodore sold hundreds of thousands of Amiga 1000's in the US - not millions. It was expensive and a brand new platform. Nevertheless the US was a core market. In hindsight that's not a ton of units but more than any other market. Germany was also a very strong market for early adopters. Commodore sold a couple million Amiga 500's in the US. And the US was the Amiga 2000's largest market aimed directly at professionals and amatuer videographers. Does that mean the Amiga 2000 sold well in general? No. But there were enough out there for companies like GVP to create upgrades and generate sales in the millions of dollars.
I've chatted with Gerard Bucas multiple times over the years electronically. He left Commodore to create the hardware C= simply didn't have the resources or leadership internally to produce, but that he knew the Amiga platform could and should provide to customers. And his company did very well serving that high-end market - as well as supporting the A500 - and had a good run prior to Commodore's implosion.
When the Amiga 600 launched in 1991 it was mainly a WTF moment.
Why would an A500 user in Texas who had owned one since 1987 go buy an A600
4-5 years later? Hard to justify or fathom. When the A1200 and 4000 shipped at the end of 1992 and early 1993 respectively, the US had begun the transition to PCs (and the Macintosh for desktop publishing) except in some professional creative environments and with the die-hards. Meanwhile the UK and EU had a very strong - yet brief - bump mainly due to the A1200's affordability and excellent and successful regional marketing campaigns.
I’d like to get some clarity from Bucas and will see if he remembers, but I have a theory based on his Sales document and C='s hardware release dates as to GVP’s numbers absolutely exploded in 1992.
My theory:
GVP’s sales explosion in 1992 wasn’t from the A1200, which was released as late as October of that year. GVP wasn't selling upgrades for a brand new platform the instant it was released at the end of a calendar year. It was the announcement by Commodore that the A1200 and A4000 were the next products in the pipeline. If you were a professional using a Toaster 2000 (which didn’t fit an A3000 desktop) waiting for an upgrade beyond the A3000T (which cost $5,000) and saw the prices and specs of the upcoming A4000 it would have been a no-brainer for a lot of studios to buy a much cheaper yet very high-performing accelerator and/or SCSI controller for your existing A2000 and just upgrade Workbench to 2.0+. In other words, GVP reaped the rewards of Commodore’s too-little too-late 1992/3 hardware releases.
North America started off strong, but by late 1992 the core user base really started to shift noticeably to the UK/EU for both the 8-bit and 16-bit hardware. By 1992 the C64 was already 10 years old and the Amiga 500/2000 5 years old. For people that used the C64 only for games, the game consoles of the late 80s and early 90s had already realistically surpassed much of what the Amiga could do for them. Also, and it pains me to say this, but Doom did happen. And it was real. And CD-ROM adoption.
Could Commodore have done a much better job marketing the Amiga to the US
home computer market, while Sega and Nintendo flooded American living rooms? No doubt about it. But let’s face it: Commodore was a mess with a total lack in leadership and vision. And the UK/EU markets weren't enough on their own to keep C= afloat, either, unfortunately.
Once Commodore collapsed in 1994 it took everyone down with it. By 1996, when GVP folded the EU was in its transitional phase to other platforms as well. And then there were the die-hards and hangers-on, the global IP tug of war and confusing final days of the 1990s and early 2000s.
