So GoPro have finally thrown in the towel and realised the Karma does not have the ‘wings’ they’d hoped for - in other words, they’ve been trounced by DJI. Is anyone surprised?
Dji is too strong of a competition for them to have an impact on the market… tbh, lets face it… it had a shocking start with it dropping out the sky on release
I wanted Karma to do well. I originally looked at that instead of mavic. Image quality was definitely better but for a folding drone was just too bulky.
The market definitely needs some competition so not good if GoPro have thrown the towel in.
GoPro summed up the way things are going pretty well
the company decided the drone market was “untenable” due to “a hostile regulatory environment in Europe and the United States (that) will likely reduce the total addressable market in the years ahead.”
I’ve got one, was my first drone. It’s massive compared to the Mavic but paired with the my Hero 6 its a really good platform. Sad to see people will lose their jobs.
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Agreed about the jobs. I have GoPros too and it was a good idea to make a flying platform for them. However, a combination of bad timing, quality problems and misreading the market lead to the Karma’s downfall.
I remember there were rumours that GoPro would announce the Karma at CES exactly 4 years ago (or was it even 5?), and even that launch was dramatically delayed, then restricted to only parts of the world, then there was a massive recall and redesign.
Seems like they got pretty much all phases of the development completely wrong.
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The thing is that before my Mavic, I flew mostly custom quads and hexes. I used GoPro3s and 4s on them with FPV transmitted back to myself. To push the Karma, GoPro made the GoPro5 so that the was no analogue camera output only HDMI. That meant that you required a digital to analogue converter for FPV which was more weighty and not compatible with any of my existing setups. That means since I’ve not bought another GoPro. I know that I was not the only one. Now companies like Foxeer are rising up as good competition, their market is primarily FPV and so people are going on their direction.
Im not suprised at all. How could they compete with Dji in the drone market. Dji is around 2 years ahead the competitors. There are no better drones really. I cant wait to see mavic 2:grinning: