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.
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.
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.