Is the Amico dead?

[SegaSnatcher]

43 minutes ago, Rev said:

I remember they had a 10 million dollar marketing campaign lined up. You couldnt of been more wrong!!!  ?. They also have  celebrities waiting to help promote. 
 

Skip to 1 hour 47 min:

 

 

 

 

"The most famous people in the world are going to be talking about this console."     

Yeah, see that is when people should have had their BS meters going off.  I also remember how he teased a spot on the Ellen show 2 yrs back.  So much puffery its ridiculous. 

[SegaSnatcher]

6 minutes ago, mr_me said:

Their primary target market is quite specific, families with children under age seven.  I think they recognize that once kids are older they'll start asking for those other systems.

Kids who are not quite ready for something like a Switch are likely playing on one of those Leap Frog devices or a kid's Tablet and well the Amico is definitely not a Leap Frog or Tablet alternative.  

[Cebus Capucinis]

26 minutes ago, SegaSnatcher said:

Kids who are not quite ready for something like a Switch are likely playing on one of those Leap Frog devices or a kid's Tablet and well the Amico is definitely not a Leap Frog or Tablet alternative.  

And, even if they aren't, if the choice is $50-100 for a Leap Frog tablet, or even just games on a phone or tablet you already own vs. $250-350 (!!!) for a device which will likely provide precisely the same quality, why on God's green Earth would you choose the $350 option? (admittedly, precisely your point!)

 

But we know what asking that question does.

 

 

"it's not just for kids, it's for the parents too."

 

Yes, but the Switch already does that.

 

"Well it's not for the same people. It's for someone different."

 

Who would otherwise just get their kids a tablet or phone game?

 

"No, not those people, OTHER people."

 

So the market is people who OTHERWISE would buy a Switch, but have a kid too small for one, and OTHERWISE don't want to just buy a $.99 phone game or even a $50 Leapfrog? And there's somehow 3 billion of these specific types of consumers?

 

"No. You're getting it wrong. <Cites "facts" precisely the opposite of what was said solely to be contrarian>"

[SegaSnatcher]

15 minutes ago, Cebus Capucinis said:

And, even if they aren't, if the choice is $50-100 for a Leap Frog tablet, or even just games on a phone or tablet you already own vs. $250-350 (!!!) for a device which will likely provide precisely the same quality, why on God's green Earth would you choose the $350 option? (admittedly, precisely your point!)

 

But we know what asking that question does.

 

 

"it's not just for kids, it's for the parents too."

 

Yes, but the Switch already does that.

 

"Well it's not for the same people. It's for someone different."

 

Who would otherwise just get their kids a tablet or phone game?

 

"No, not those people, OTHER people."

 

So the market is people who OTHERWISE would buy a Switch, but have a kid too small for one, and OTHERWISE don't want to just buy a $.99 phone game or even a $50 Laepfrog? And there's somehow 3 billion of these specific types of consumers?

 

"No. You're getting it wrong. <Cites "facts" precisely the opposite of what was said solely to be contrarian>"

Best post in this thread.  It's basically the whole issue with IE's strategy. 

[MrBeefy]

1 hour ago, Rev said:

I remember they had a 10 million dollar marketing campaign lined up. You couldnt of been more wrong!!!  ?. They also have  celebrities waiting to help promote. 
 

Skip to 1 hour 47 min:

 

Once again overestimating his star power and expecting people to gravitate to him.

32 minutes ago, Cebus Capucinis said:

 

(Nothing against moms in general, but I can safely say all my female friends who read "mom blogs" and watch "mommy YouTubers" fall PRECISELY into this description.)

At the price it is and the price it will be assuming they make it to market would probably not help. It would however show that they are actually targeting that market than stuffing tripe down people's faces. I'm surprised as to how many people love tripe.

 

15 minutes ago, SegaSnatcher said:

Kids who are not quite ready for something like a Switch are likely playing on one of those Leap Frog devices or a kid's Tablet and well the Amico is definitely not a Leap Frog or Tablet alternative.  

No and in many ways the Amico will be a worse alternative than a Switch. Young kids will struggle with using a touchscreen while trying to focus on an entirely different screen.  If you noticed in my earlier picture Jr. Beef was utilizing the Switch in touch mode. He can see the screen and knows what to do.

 

Expecting very young kids to try and split attention between two screens is not a winning strategy. If the former CEO had decided to have a kid instead of putting all his energy into this floundering project he would have a 3 year old toddler and have some first hand knowledge of the problems with their design.

8 minutes ago, Cebus Capucinis said:

And, even if they aren't, if the choice is $50-100 for a Leap Frog tablet, or even just games on a phone or tablet you already own vs. $250-350 (!!!) for a device which will likely provide precisely the same quality, why on God's green Earth would you choose the $350 option?

 

But we know what asking that question does.

 

"it's not just for kids, it's for the parents too."

 

Yes, but the Switch already does that.

 

"Well it's not for the same people. It's for someone different."

 

Who would otherwise just get their kids a tablet or phone game?

 

"No, not those people, OTHER people."

 

So the market is people who OTHERWISE would buy a Switch, but have a kid too small for one? And there's somehow 3 billion of these specific types of consumers?

 

"No. You're getting it wrong. <Cites "facts" precisely the opposite of what was said solely to be contrarian>"

Uh, It's not for you because you are a gaming racist. ?

[Cebus Capucinis]

1 minute ago, MrBeefy said:

Uh, It's not for you because you are a gaming racist.

[MrBeefy]

3 minutes ago, SegaSnatcher said:

Best post in this thread.  It's basically the whole issue with IE's strategy. 

That is because it started as a retro bait console and along the way someone started to throw out the casual BS for strictly investment purposes. 

 

That is why they have zero focus and direction. They have to keep up the visage, and that's why it is cyclical arguements. They have no answers. It is also why their only real strategy was to tell about boobs on the Switch or whatever dumb thing it was. 

[phoenixdownita]

2 hours ago, mr_me said:

...

 

Their primary target market is quite specific, families with children under age seven.  I think they recognize that once kids are older they'll start asking for those other systems rather than something new.

 

 

That for sure does not add up to their taunted "potential" audience (as scraped from their startengine campaign [which I cannot find anymore in the clear]):

 

reality is Amico is not a portable console, and the best selling home console is still PS2 with about 155 million so that is the best audience proxy (as in count) they can ever dream of potentially match, and as we've seen with all other home consoles since it's a pretty tall order. Actually the Wii with its controller gimmick and totally different target stopped at about 102 M so maybe that's more like the "unicorns and rainbows" target number (not audience).

 

There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet including kids, the 3B number cannot work even if each person has a partner and they all have exactly 1 kid as that would give 7.9/3=2.6 "families" and that is nowhere near realistic (there's no way anyone serious assumes a 100% reach and the number above assume all kids are young etc...etc.... note that if a family has 2 kids it's still only 1 Amico so more kids per family makes the target smaller not bigger) .... drilling deeper estimates give the global kids population at 1.9 B of which ~1.7B are not in high income countries (defined as GNI per capita of 12K or more) .... so that leaves a lot less potential audience than the nonsense number they published (if you make <=12K US$ per year you are looking at less than 1K US$ per month .... I don't see an Amico as a wise thing to buy under those conditions, and 12K US$ [12.6K US$ to be pedantic] is the upper limit of the upper-middle income countries, the lower limit for the upper-middle income countries is at 4.1K US$, aka ~350US$ per month ... not a target ....)

[MrBeefy]

36 minutes ago, phoenixdownita said:

That for sure does not add up to their taunted "potential" audience (as scraped from their startengine campaign [which I cannot find anymore in the clear]):

 

reality is Amico is not a portable console, and the best selling home console is still PS2 with about 155 million so that is the best audience proxy (as in count) they can ever dream of potentially match, and as we've seen with all other home consoles since it's a pretty tall order. Actually the Wii with his controller gimmick and totally different target stopped at about 102 M so maybe that's more like the "unicorn and rainbow" target number (not audience).

 

There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet including kids, the 3B number cannot work even if each person has a partner and they all have exactly 1 kid as that would give 7.9/3=2.6 "families" and that is nowhere near realistic (there's no way anyone serious assumes a 100% reach and the number above assume all kids are young etc...etc.... note that if a family has 2 kids it's still only 1 Amico so more kids per family makes the target smaller not bigger) .... drilling deeper estimates give the global kids population at 1.9 B of which ~1.7B are not in high income countries (defined as GNI per capita of 12K or more) .... so that leaves a lot less potential audience than the nonsense number they published (if you make <=12K per year you are looking at less than 1K US$ per months .... I don't see an Amico as a wise thing to buy under those condition, and 12K [12.6K to be pedantic] is the upper limit, the lower is at 4.1K, aka ~350US$ per month ... not a target).

Along with not being able to spell Intellivision has issues with numbers they throw out. In many lower income countries, households will have a phone (which they will casually game on) but not a TV (requirement for Amico). Even the articles the former CEO would use as proof had many confounding variables that didn't prove the point. 

 

At this point I think the upper limit of customers may really only be 6000. That's if you ignore that some people bought more than one console. ?

 

[SegaSnatcher]

17 minutes ago, MrBeefy said:

At this point I think the upper limit of customers may really only be 6000. That's if you ignore that some people bought more than one console. ?

 

Of course anything can happen, but whatever preorders they currently have is likely what they will manufacture and that will be the end of it.  I don't see any situation where they support this console for longer than 6 months once its released.  I doubt any new games have been given a green light to either be developed exclusively or ported to Amico in the past couple of months. 

[phoenixdownita]

1 hour ago, MrBeefy said:

Along with not being able to spell Intellivision has issues with numbers they throw out. In many lower income countries, households will have a phone (which they will casually game on) but not a TV (requirement for Amico). Even the articles the former CEO would use as proof had many confounding variables that didn't prove the point. 

 

At this point I think the upper limit of customers may really only be 6000. That's if you ignore that some people bought more than one console. ?

 

Just to make it painfully clear, low income countries have a GNI per capita of less than 1K US$ per year (and count about 650M people), lower-middle income countries go from 1K to 4K which is also completely unrealistic as a target for Amico imho.

Even the upper-middle income countries are a stretch in that many of them are less than 7.5K US$ a year (that's 625 gross a month) https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/the-world-by-income-and-region.html
 

Population by income https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-by-income-level

NOTE: this search is making me depressed, I feel now so "blessed" for what I have (not because I particularly deserve it but because of the luck of being born in some place instead of some place else and a few and at times lucky choices my parents and then me made along the way ....).
Literally from the data above about 1.2B people live in high income countries (and even there poverty is an issue) and that's about 16% of the population, the remaining 84% has it much much rougher one way or another, to anyone reading this and attempting to market a glorified toy please stop throwing around numbers that can be seen as insulting. Reality is the vast majority of the world population cannot afford a 250-350US$ console.

[roots.genoa]

9 hours ago, Rev said:

I didnt realize Dynablasters was coming to Switch as well. What other exclusives are en route to other platforms?  
 

Space Strikers is coming to Switch or xbox? Sesame Street, Care Bears, and Evil Kenevil are also cell phone ports. 
 

Does anyone have a definitive list of all games that are coming and also actually started programming?

Dolphin Quest (Ecco the Dolphin's spiritual successor) is another one. Actually it was never supposed to be an Amico exclusive, but the Amico was supposed to get an exclusive 4-player coop mode (instead of 2-player). A Kickstarter campaign should happen this year as Beefy already said.

 

Also I'm glad you mentioned the latest BurgerTime game, because I'm still puzzled about it. When it was revealed, I was struck by the fact it really looked as if it was made for the Amico: several 4-player modes including both versus and coop, 2D graphics that are not pixelart (mimicking Cuphead that Tommy mentioned several times iirc), and of course a license that was supposed to appear on the Amico.

When I talked about it here, IE's CEO dismissed it immediately, claiming 'their' BurgerTime would be prettier and (of course) sound better, etc. But Amico's BurgerTime is precisely one of the games we never saw (and may never will). So personally, I'm still not convinced they're not the same game and, given what happened with ToeJam & Earl and other games, I wouldn't be surprised if we find out one day that it was made for the Amico (or at least several systems including the Amico) but the deal didn't work out. But of course, we may never find out even if it's true unfortunately.

[mr_me]

5 hours ago, Cebus Capucinis said:

...

"No. You're getting it wrong. <Cites "facts" precisely the opposite of what was said solely to be contrarian>"

What is this about.  The post about the kids says they agree with you.  They also say kids of that age will ask for the other game systems, and they don't expect to do well in that demographic according to their market research.

 

4 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

That is because it started as a retro bait console and along the way someone started to throw out the casual BS for strictly investment purposes. 

....

I wrote this before, from the original reveal press release in October 2018.  It was there from the beginning. 

 

"Our goal was to create a console that both gamers and non-gamers are able to have fun with and play together"

 

4 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

No and in many ways the Amico will be a worse alternative than a Switch. Young kids will struggle with using a touchscreen while trying to focus on an entirely different screen.  If you noticed in my earlier picture Jr. Beef was utilizing the Switch in touch mode. He can see the screen and knows what to do.

 

Expecting very young kids to try and split attention between two screens is not a winning strategy. If the former CEO had decided to have a kid instead of putting all his energy into this floundering project he would have a 3 year old toddler and have some first hand knowledge of the problems with their design.

What Amico games require you to split focus between two screens.  The gameplay is typically on the TV.  Brain Duel has the question on the TV and you answer on the touchscreen but that's not unusual, nor is looking at your hand in a strategy game.

 

4 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

That for sure does not add up to their taunted "potential" audience (as scraped from their startengine campaign [which I cannot find anymore in the clear]):

The billions comes from their second target audience, casuals.  Of course three billion casual gamers isn't a business case nor do they expect to sell millions of consoles.  The Startengine page does mention a serviceable addressable market estimate.

 

12 hours ago, Rev said:

...

Does anyone have a definitive list of all games that are coming and also actually started programming?

There's a list on their FAQ of about twenty Amico games expected around launch.

[Beatley82]

What always bugged me most about the Amico marketing was the total mistruth that the mid 90s onwards killed local multi player be it versus or co-op, as if I'd been imagining playing Mario Kart with my little nieces and nephews, or Super Puzzle Fighter on the Playstation with my 63 year old mum, or various sports or fighting games with my friends down the years. Just an absolute nonsense. 

[IMBerzerk]

So... Have we reached this point yet?  Or are we willing to keep going...

 

Whatever they did or possibly  doing (no one really knows) just pissed off a whole lot of people, completely ruined one guy's personal integrity and put a great community on the balls of it's ass with a truckload of total BS.  

 

Text book example of a good product idea very poorly managed into a colossal trainwreck.

[mr_me]

3 hours ago, Beatley82 said:

What always bugged me most about the Amico marketing was the total mistruth that the mid 90s onwards killed local multi player be it versus or co-op, as if I'd been imagining playing Mario Kart with my little nieces and nephews, or Super Puzzle Fighter on the Playstation with my 63 year old mum, or various sports or fighting games with my friends down the years. Just an absolute nonsense. 

Where did they say this.  Online gaming didn't really happen until well into the 2000s.

[jerseystyle]

It’ll always be a mystery to me why, with these millions of marketing research/budgeting, kid friendly, made for moms, etc, what they actually did was completely the opposite: let’s have our CEO go on random middle age man hyper niche YouTube channels for two years. How is that appealing to families? It’s been shown he was having “secret” meetings with these guys to discuss strategy FFS! Remember when all those random creepy dudes showed up at Crayola (one even bringing “security”?) I mean, just maybe, the temperament of their CEO wasn’t really a good fit for their ideas…

[Steven Pendleton]

13 minutes ago, IMBerzerk said:

So... Have we reached this point yet?  Or are we willing to keep going...

 

Whatever they did or possibly  doing (no one really knows) just pissed off a whole lot of people, completely ruined one guy's personal integrity and put a great community on the balls of it's ass with a truckload of total BS.  

 

Text book example of a good product idea very poorly managed into a colossal trainwreck.

It's spring in the northern hemisphere. There is a Japanese proverb that goes 春先は死んだ馬の首も動く, which translates to "at the beginning of spring, a dead horse's neck also moves".

 

This proverb is supposed to applied to other stuff, like things beginning in spring or something like that, but you know...

Edited April 4, 2022 by Steven Pendleton

[Albert]

2 minutes ago, mr_me said:

Where did they say this.  Online gaming didn't really happen until well into the 2000s.

This isn't true at all, many MMORPGs launched in the mid to late 90s, including Ultima Online (1997, and testing in 1996), Starcraft (1998), Lineage (1998) and EverQuest (1999).  And there were other games you could play online with others, such as Quake, which was released in 1996. 

 

 ..Al

[mr_me]

34 minutes ago, Albert said:

This isn't true at all, many MMORPGs launched in the mid to late 90s, including Ultima Online (1997, and testing in 1996), Starcraft (1998), Lineage (1998) and EverQuest (1999).  And there were other games you could play online with others, such as Quake, which was released in 1996. 

 

 ..Al

Yes, and that's what I meant by "really"; the time it became popular on console gaming and allegedly having an impact on local multiplayer, which is what Beatley82 was talking about.  I didn't think PC was ever really a platform for local multiplayer, lan parties aside and  PC having local multiplayer games, I remember playing Double Dragon II with a buddy on a 386.

Edited April 4, 2022 by mr_me

[phoenixdownita]

5 hours ago, mr_me said:

....

The billions comes from their second target audience, casuals.  Of course three billion casual gamers isn't a business case nor do they expect to sell millions of consoles.  The Startengine page does mention a serviceable addressable market estimate.

 

...

It's still deceiving to cite bs numbers on an official "fund raising" campaign, there are no 3B casual gamers in the "potential audience" given the total population in the high income countries is 1.2B ... period and as we are at it "no, really" and I mean it as "really, really".

 

20 minutes ago, mr_me said:

Yes, and that's what I meant by "really"; the time it became popular on console gaming and allegedly having an impact on local multiplayer, which is what Beatley82 was talking about.  I didn't think PC was ever really a platform for local multiplayer, lan parties aside and  PC having local multiplayer games, I remember playing Double Dragon II with a buddy on a 386.

2 kinds of really, which one do you really mean?

[mr_me]

19 minutes ago, phoenixdownita said:

It's still deceiving to cite bs numbers on an official "fund raising" campaign, there are no 3B casual gamers in the "potential audience" given the total population in the high income countries is 1.2B ... period and as we are at it "no, really" and I mean it as "really, really".

 

2 kinds of really, which one do you really mean?

Really!

 

Edit:

Seriously, both times used similarly, in a negative, expressing some doubt: "didn't really" and "didnt think ... ever really".

Edited April 4, 2022 by mr_me

[youxia]

I agree this thread has kinda ran its course, I might revisit it again when something regarding Amico actually happens IRL.

[Rev]

Online gaming was pioneered by Mattel in the 80’s. Long live Mattel Intellivision!

 

 

[Rev]

14 minutes ago, youxia said:

I agree this thread has kinda ran its course, I might revisit it again when something regarding Amico actually happens IRL.