The industry was pretty regional back then, which may make for a fuzzier historical record. U.S. insularity means some histories neglect this, and assume what's true for the U.S. held true elsewhere (which is a safer assumption today).
Interesting that the author says the 1200 "seemed to rule" in the UK in early 90's. Why didn't it succeed elsewhere? It seemed powerful and good value at the time.
USA Amiga advertising was cringe-worthy. Truly bad. The initial 1000 launch was fine, but the US 500 era advertising was mostly risible and simply gave away millions of sales to Atari. Newtek and EA probably made more Amiga sales than C= US.
They moved Pleasance to Commodore International to try and repeat UK success in USA. It is only then in 1991 or thereabouts that they started making deals with big retailers like Sears, Walmart etc. Someone should have been doing that in 86.
The successful packs - The Disney box, the Batman pack were all C= UK (Pleasance) created. Germany was doing very well creatively too. C= Intl was worth keeping for engineering, not whoever in West Chester was marketing.
The UK had a strong Amiga magazine contingent, probably around a dozen mainstream titles with respectable sales figures. Every newsagent would have at least four or five titles on their shelves.
Those magazines lived on top of a flourishing ecosystem of businesses, everything from Amiga hardware sellers to public domain software distributors.
It was a system just waiting for Commodore (and their replacements) to utter anything useful. It was so disappointing to watch each owner screw up and see different parts of that ecosystem fail one at a time.
Interesting that the author says the 1200 "seemed to rule" in the UK in early 90's. Why didn't it succeed elsewhere? It seemed powerful and good value at the time.