Is the Amico dead?

[MrBeefy]

2 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

It's all the gaming communists fault! 

[MrBeefy]

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

Without retailer purchase orders there are no retail sales, so it's an important step.  It is the responsibility of Intellivision Entertainment to back retailers with the marketing required to sell those units.  If they don't sell, it's the company's fault, not the retailers.  Unlike the Atari VCS, for example, retailer sales will be critical to the success of Amico.  They won't reach their target audience in the numbers they need without them.  If that fails so does the company.  Whatever happens, securing those purchase orders is still an achievement that shouldn't be diminished.

Intellivision didn't even tell the retailer Game Stop it wasn't coming out yesterday, and I think they've reached their target audience.

 

Besides they can't even make the Founder Editions. Does anyone think they can actually produce enough units to get into retail? Does anyone think they have money to market it? Even if it launches it is a dead end from there. Does anyone really believe people are going to buy this at $300 to $350?

[mr_me]

1 hour ago, kevtris said:

Any market research that was performed is woefully out of date now; 3-4 years old at this point. I suspect market research has a half-life of 3-6 months for a market that moves as fast as video games. 

What's changed in the last three to six months?  Might not matter with the groups they're targeting.

 

27 minutes ago, MrBeefy said:

Intellivision didn't even tell the retailer Game Stop it wasn't coming out yesterday, and I think they've reached their target audience.

 

Besides they can't even make the Founder Editions. Does anyone think they can actually produce enough units to get into retail? Does anyone think they have money to market it? Even if it launches it is a dead end from there. Does anyone really believe people are going to buy this at $300 to $350?

Different retailers had different dates.  That's something for Gsmestop to sort out with their customers.  The last release date from the company was  October 10, 2021.

 

They've said the upper limit their target market will bear is $250.  If they can't do that, they might as well give up.  There might be no profit initially at that price, but they'll have to figure it out when they move production to Asia.  With a shift to a softlaunch,  that might still be a while away.

[m-crew]

2 hours ago, jerseystyle said:

 

2 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

who's the actor? what's the skit?

So in context, it made me laugh so hard  ... thank you .... "the path of the righteous has to lead to the right or he/she would be called the lefteous which is not even a word and I don't know why"

2 hours ago, jerseystyle said:

(106) Human sheep looking to mate on family day! - YouTube

[m-crew]

1 hour ago, MrBeefy said:

It's all the gaming communists fault! 

Still as dumb as f..... meatball

 

Edited April 2, 2022 by m-crew

[Albert]

If you guys don't want this thread locked or removed, or you don't want to get permanently kicked from this thread, stay away from politics.  This will be the only warning.

 

 ..Al

[MrBeefy]

19 minutes ago, mr_me said:

What's changed in the last three to six months?  Might not matter with the groups they're targeting.

 

Different retailers had different dates.  That's something for Gsmestop to sort out with their customers.  The last release date from the company was  October 10, 2021.

 

They've said the upper limit their target market will bear is $250.  If they can't do that, they might as well give up.  There might be no profit initially at that price, but they'll have to figure it out when they move production to Asia.  With a shift to a softlaunch,  that might still be a while away.

Phil Adam said they would go to $300 or up to $350 at retail.

 

It is totally IE's fault. It is their job to inform the retailers. Remember all the talk about how they had to work with retailers about dates? They obviously don't care. Wonder if GS will try and get Intellivision to foot the charge bill.

[m-crew]

So till me people , what has the inflation been this year, last year and the year before... Put that in your mind and then you can see why the price has gone up.. wake the f up ..... man .. That limit was over three years ago ... come on people ..  where has common sense and logical and critical thinking gone......  

[m-crew]

The price of meatballs has gone up , hasn't it

[Albert]

7 minutes ago, m-crew said:

So till me people , what has the inflation been this year, last year and the year before... Put that in your mind and then you can see why the price has gone up.. wake the f up ..... man .. That limit was over three years ago ... come on people ..  where has common sense and logical and critical thinking gone......  

I'm not the one who needs to wake the fuck up, but, hey, obviously you didn't want to continue talking about the Amico and just wanted to get some stupid political gunslinging in.  Your choice.

 

 ..Al

[MrBeefy]

4 minutes ago, m-crew said:

So till me people , what has the inflation been this year, last year and the year before... Put that in your mind and then you can see why the price has gone up.. wake the f up ..... man .. That limit was over three years ago ... come on people ..  where has common sense and logical and critical thinking gone......  

I can still buy a Switch at the same price. ?‍♂️

 

Price went up on the console before the pandemic. It is still overpriced at $250. The reason why prices have gone up has zero to do with no one wanting to buy it at $300-$350. Only around 6000 want to buy it in the $250-$300 range. Raising the price is not a solid strategy.

[Rev]

36 minutes ago, MrBeefy said:

I can still buy a Switch at the same price. ?‍♂️

 

Price went up on the console before the pandemic. It is still overpriced at $250. The reason why prices have gone up has zero to do with no one wanting to buy it at $300-$350. Only around 6000 want to buy it in the $250-$300 range. Raising the price is not a solid strategy.

The Switch mini is only 200.00 usd. A great deal!  We have 3 Switches. The library, both physical and digital are fantastic. Even with lots of retro compilations. Two volumes of Atari classics as well. 

[SoloZolo]

Outside factors seem kind of irrelevant when we know that $100 off every unit is going directly to repaying an investor. They could eat that loss out of whatever margin they have, but it seems like that's not the plan. The hardware in this machine is low end. Those that know better than me estimate manufacturing costs no where close to $250, never mind the higher prices Adams has suggested. That price bump implies they're passing on the cost of management's bad business decisions onto the marketplace.

 

Speaking of contractual obligations, I wonder how charitable the IP licenses Intellivision signed are. Some of this stuff was meant to be out in 2020. You'd assume that since this is a digital-only platform that they signed long term contracts, but it would be ... amusing (?) if their contracts started expiring before anything was released.

 

 

[Pink]

10 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

Way back when I thought this had way more potential than the atacoshoebox. They almost had to work harder to make themselves look worse than Atari. I think they are working on being worse than the Chameleon, but we aren't to the official end.

At the start Tommy definitely said a lot of the right things off the bat. $150 price (Or was it $180? My memory is fuzzy and it's been a few years) No crowdfunding, a new exclusive Earthworm Jim game, talk of maybe reviving some other dormant IP's from the 16 bit days back in the 90s, and talk of other potential partners with a lot of experience themselves, it definitely looked a lot more promising at the time then the Atari VCS.

 

At $150-180 i'd definitely be potentially interested in a console with a potentially decent library of SNES/Sega Genesis style platformers (Maybe maybe like a modern day SNES/Genesis and a cheaper alternative to a Switch or a Playstation/Xbox) Now granted, I don't know if that would be enough to make it successful in the grand scheme of things, but I myself would of definitely have been possibly interested regardless. And it would of definitely of had a much greater chance at success and had a lot more people interested, and it would be a lot more interesting versus a $250 console playing old Intellivision games from the 1970s with jazzed up graphics and sound effects.

 

But alas, with how this entire saga has unfolded, and in hindsight we can see a lot of what Tommy said was (to put it mildly) pure puffery, and numerous other things that have happened over the past several years (Like the stolen assets in their tank game, Tommy too busy arguing and picking fights with randos on the internet and talking about haters, their SEC filing, etc. to name just a few) and the fact that Earthworm Jim appears to be vaporware that was initially shown off to drum up hype and get people to invest, this whole thing has turned out to be a colossal, overpriced disappointment before it has even released (That's assuming it ever actually releases which is a big if right now, based on their SEC filing and everything else that we currently know)

Edited April 2, 2022 by Pink

[MrBeefy]

1 hour ago, Rev said:

The Switch mini is only 200.00 usd. A great deal!  We have 3 Switches. The library, both physical and digital are fantastic. Even with lots of retro compilations. Two volumes of Atari classics as well. 

There are a good chunk of Arcade Archives. This one came out recently and looks cool, but I don't know much about it. https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/arcade-archives-empire-city-1931-switch/

 

15 minutes ago, SoloZolo said:

Speaking of contractual obligations, I wonder how charitable the IP licenses Intellivision signed are. Some of this stuff was meant to be out in 2020. You'd assume that since this is a digital-only platform that they signed long term contracts, but it would be ... amusing (?) if their contracts started expiring before anything was released.

I wondered this myself.

[Pink]

As this whole thing has become beyond ridiculous at this point in time, I might do what digdugNate has done, although sometimes I just can't help myself and need to chime in for the heck of it.

On 3/23/2022 at 5:44 AM, digdugnate said:

I'm going to use a phrase that's popular right now and call this my 'airport post'.  I'm noping right out of here because this discussion is ridiculous.

 

[+Lathe26]

On 4/1/2022 at 9:58 AM, Downland1983 said:

... and because of how memorable Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign was that appeared all over television networks lampooning Vista at the time.   

The "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign started off really well for Apple.  However, the wheels came of it long before Apple finally killed it.  After a while, the Apple guy started coming of smarmy / smug to the point that folks thought that the "PC guy is sexier" as stated appearing in multiple press articles.  Then things took a bad turn when Mac started making misleading / dishonest claims to the point the the UK government took Apple to court for false advertising (Apple's defense won only on a technicality).

 

Anyways, this is way off topic from the Amico so I should probably shut up now.  ?

[SegaSnatcher]

4 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

I can still buy a Switch at the same price. ?‍♂️

 

At the end of the day this is the reality.   No matter how many times people want to say Amico does not compete with the Switch they will always be 100% wrong, because the Switch offers many easy to play couch co-op games. With Switch Sports coming out soon that will be another big title for the families. This goes back to the whole Amico is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Nintendo has been catering to families in their advertising for awhile now. Good luck competing with the likes of Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera. 

All the Amico needed to be was an inexpensive retro nostalgia box for INTV fans, but IE got greedy and decided they wanted a bigger slice of the market by targeting casuals/families. The problem with that approach is IE never had the brand power or IP pull to make that a reality. To this day the Amico is still lacking a true killer app that will pull in this family/casual crowd they are so hell bent on to appeal to. 
 

 

 

Edited April 2, 2022 by SegaSnatcher

[roots.genoa]

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

who's the actor? what's the skit?

Larry David, and probably from his (excellent) show Curb Your Enthusiasm. He's especially good at looking suspicious (both ways).

 

Anyway, to me incompetence is the main reason the Amico did not 'perform' as expected, so it's not too far fetched to consider incompetence is also responsible for other problems in the world, even though I suspect it wasn't what m-crew had in mind. ? To me, the origin of every evil is ignorance anyway, if I'm allowed to be a little philosophical here (which is not that far from being political, imho). Amico fans tend to call everyone disagreeing with them 'haters', but in the end most of them seem to be driven by hatred for other systems/companies and modern gaming, rather than love for the Amico. But to be honest it's difficult to defend something you haven't tried yet. ?

[youxia]

Dear Lord, Christina Aguilera is 41 years old apparently. Time to die ?

[MrBeefy]

4 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:

At the end of the day this is the reality.   No matter how many times people want to say Amico does not compete with the Switch they will always be 100% wrong, because the Switch offers many easy to play couch co-op games. With Switch Sports coming out soon that will be another big title for the families. This goes back to the whole Amico is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Nintendo has been catering to families in their advertising for awhile now. Good luck competing with the likes of Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera. 

All the Amico needed to be was an inexpensive retro nostalgia box for INTV fans, but IE got greedy and decided they wanted a bigger slice of the market by targeting casuals/families. The problem with that approach is IE never had the brand power or IP pull to make that a reality. To this day the Amico is still lacking a true killer app that will pull in this family/casual crowd they are so hell bent on to appeal to. 
 

 

 

It's only real chance to be in the same space as the Switch was killed by the price. A lower price with small simple games could have helped. Kind of like a "kid's first console". It is 100% a retro nostalgia bait console which tacked on the 'casual gaming' talk as an investor talking point.

 

It makes zero sense for a family to buy an Amico over a Switch at the price without the nostalgia being the main draw. The software they have shown isn't special or stand out enough at the same price as the Switch to make a dent in that market. Switch eshop has a bunch of similar games and will usually be as cheap or cheaper than Amico games.

 

Take the name Intellivision out of it and it would be interesting to see how many of those 6000 would have preordered.

[masschamber]

3 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

It's only real chance to be in the same space as the Switch was killed by the price. A lower price with small simple games could have helped. Kind of like a "kid's first console". It is 100% a retro nostalgia bait console which tacked on the 'casual gaming' talk as an investor talking point.

 

It makes zero sense for a family to buy an Amico over a Switch at the price without the nostalgia being the main draw. The software they have shown isn't special or stand out enough at the same price as the Switch to make a dent in that market. Switch eshop has a bunch of similar games and will usually be as cheap or cheaper than Amico games.

 

Take the name Intellivision out of it and it would be interesting to see how many of those 6000 would have preordered.

Silly looking console with odd ball controllers called Tommy t's electric Boogaloo box?  I'd have bought it, but I also bought a philips in2it , not exactly a typical mainstream consumers

[mr_me]

12 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

Phil Adam said they would go to $300 or up to $350 at retail.

 

It is totally IE's fault. It is their job to inform the retailers. Remember all the talk about how they had to work with retailers about dates? They obviously don't care. Wonder if GS will try and get Intellivision to foot the charge bill.

The CEO did complain about costs and losses in an interview but those numbers aren't from him.  They are from a videogame writer who based it from the startengine risk disclosure which gave a range of $250 to $350.  The CEO also said the market will dictate the price, which everyone says can't go up.  So they'll have to figure out their costs.  Costs are a reason they've delayed manufacturing.

 

8 hours ago, SegaSnatcher said:

At the end of the day this is the reality.   No matter how many times people want to say Amico does not compete with the Switch they will always be 100% wrong, because the Switch offers many easy to play couch co-op games. With Switch Sports coming out soon that will be another big title for the families. This goes back to the whole Amico is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Nintendo has been catering to families in their advertising for awhile now. Good luck competing with the likes of Jessica Alba and Christina Aguilera. 

All the Amico needed to be was an inexpensive retro nostalgia box for INTV fans, but IE got greedy and decided they wanted a bigger slice of the market by targeting casuals/families. The problem with that approach is IE never had the brand power or IP pull to make that a reality. To this day the Amico is still lacking a true killer app that will pull in this family/casual crowd they are so hell bent on to appeal to. 

The switch being a family console is fine, even if a lot of people use it as a handheld, but there should be a second family console as an alternative in the market.  It doesn't have to sell anywhere near Switch numbers to be successful.  However, the Amico and the company wasn't built for selling nostalgia.  If they can't sell half a million Amicos to their primary target markets of young families and casuals, they'll fail.  And it does have distinguishing characteristics like a curated e10+ game library focusing on couch multiplayer, disallowing in-game purchases, and of course the simplified controllers.  There is a segment of households that don't want current video game consoles in the home and what distinguishes the Amico works in its favour.   Maybe Back Talk Party will be what they'll ultimately use to push Amicos.  Might not be their killer app but their plan is a gradual ramp up from a softlaunch, so supply will be low for a while.

[MrBeefy]

1 minute ago, mr_me said:

Costs are a reason they've delayed manufacturing.

That isn't the only reason. Software and console firmware has not been ready and may still not be ready. Costs is an issue but not the sole reason as dictated by fundable and SEC. To strictly blame this on pandemic, shortages, or costs isn't accurate. If that was the reason they would be 100% on firmware, and pack in software, and backend. Which they haven't been well after the pandemic. 

[SegaSnatcher]

49 minutes ago, mr_me said:

The CEO did complain about costs and losses in an interview but those numbers aren't from him.  They are from a videogame writer who based it from the startengine risk disclosure which gave a range of $250 to $350.  The CEO also said the market will dictate the price, which everyone says can't go up.  So they'll have to figure out their costs.  Costs are a reason they've delayed manufacturing.

 

The switch being a family console is fine, even if a lot of people use it as a handheld, but there should be a second family console as an alternative in the market.  It doesn't have to sell anywhere near Switch numbers to be successful.  However, the Amico and the company wasn't built for selling nostalgia.  If they can't sell half a million Amicos to their primary target markets of young families and casuals, they'll fail.  And it does have distinguishing characteristics like a curated e10+ game library focusing on couch multiplayer, disallowing in-game purchases, and of course the simplified controllers.  There is a segment of households that don't want current video game consoles in the home and what distinguishes the Amico works in its favour.   Maybe Back Talk Party will be what they'll ultimately use to push Amicos.  Might not be their killer app but their plan is a gradual ramp up from a softlaunch, so supply will be low for a while.

We don't even know if they will still make it to retail at this point and even if they do the chance they will sell anywhere close to 500K units is extremely unlikely, especially given the price point and what Amico offers.   Millennial Parents grew up on gaming, they are not out of touch with gaming like our Parents were.  Also, this idea that Switch doesn't have games with simple to use controls is nonsense. Yes, there are core games on Switch that take full advantage of Switch's Joycons/Pro Controller, but there are also plenty of games on Switch that only require a couple of buttons to play.  

I would love to see this data showing a decent percentage of millennial families who don't think the Switch is Family Friendly enough. 

Back Talk Party is probably a good family game, but is it good enough for people to spend $249.99 for?    Again, the competition matters, especially when you can compare the game libraries.   

Also, I'm pretty sure Tommy once said that the Switch would never be as successful as the original Wii.  Well we now know that didn't end up being the case given the Switch has since outsold the Wii. 

Edited April 2, 2022 by SegaSnatcher