All this recent talk about the current Amiga market size has had me pondering about the size of the current Amiga market that has at the very least 68040, so that it could run the 3D games I like to create (at reasonable framerate and visual quality).

I'm talking about arcade fast-pace games like StunRunner, Starstrike, Star Wars (Sega 32X/Arcade), StarFox, Virus/Zarch, Star Raiders, Rez, Outrun-style racers, Tunnel-B1 and similar PS1-era arcade/action games.

This is the level of quality I can reasonably finish on my own in about 6 months once the very first game is out.

To continue to do that, about 500 copies would need to be sold. Digital copies, no physical box bullsh*t. Depending on the features and length of the game, range would be $15 - $30.


Yes, that's only 10% of my income compared to being a senior SW engineer. But for that job, you must live in area with high living costs (East/West Coast in U.S), and endure traffic (I can't anymore) and other bullsh*t and misery, so in the end, it costs a lot of money to stay miserable in that environment and keep paying off somebody else's mortgage via rent.


In my entire life as a SW engineer, I lucked out enough to be able to tell that I truly enjoyed a grand total of 3 months of work in corporate environment. Yes, that includes the 18-month contract for the MSFT being on MInecraft team. No, the Minecraft job, ironically, isn't included in those 3 months. despite it being a game coding job...

In the end, I always come back to coding on retro HW (Jaguar, Amiga).

@Heimdall

500 is certainly too optimistic.
Maybe bait on hollywood mal to publish on Android then have an amiga version?

@Heimdall

My guess is that as DC_Edge says, it is too much. However, I am not saying this with certainty.

I have tried to get some idea about how games sell in Amigaland, and I have to say, there are some surprising finds.

I am leaving the games name out, since while I think it would be okay to tell it, I am not sure, but one quite popular game serie in Amiga for Classic Amigas seems to be selling something like 1000 copies (not a fact, but this is how I understood by someones comment), despite the price being somewhere there in 40 euros or something, like many games seem to be nowadays. However, do notice, these are boxed.

In PPC Amigas, the sales I would estimate to be somewhere between 100-300 copies for a better game, so less than on classics. But problem with PPC games is that there are so few of them, and there isn't much idea how for example pricing affects them, and the "better ones" have all been digital so far I think, so not sure how selling them physically would affect sales.

But, this said, notice the "better game" definition, for there are plenty of games released in Amiga that have sold only few tens of copies to my understanding.

While it seems to be possible to sell 1000 copies, it however needs to be a hit game then already.


Point with these figures is that I would by quick estimate, based upon these, that 040+ game would have even less a market than PPC Amiga market, but, based upon classics having more market than PPC Amigas, who knows, maybe there are lots of 040 machines that are playing A500 games, and maybe the market would be closer to Classic Amiga market than PPC Amiga market.

Also, if you are first one to release a decent 040+ game, it is also possible that you wouldn't actually be competing with other Classic Amiga games, but there might be a market that is not served currently.

Therefore, while basically I would estimate the market to be less than PPC Amigas, it could surprise and be even bigger than Classic Amiga market.

It would be interesting to know RogueCrafts sales numbers. For this one seems to be a hit, but it is a hit without pre-existing hits. Hence I wonder if its sales are getting to that 1000 copies, or does it require there to be more games in the series or from same developer from before to hit that.

@Heimdall

I'd reach out to the author of Reshoot Proxima 3 to see how much that game targeted on a stock A1200 game sold. Then reduce by a magnitude of 2 for 030/50 target or a magnitude of 4 for Pistorm/080/060 level.

Last edited by BigD on 12-Feb-2025 at 09:12 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 12-Feb-2025 at 09:11 PM.

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@Heimdall

i would be intressted very much ! special for new 68k Games that possible with PiSTORM. Just 68040 with 1.5Ghz and 128mb ram so a very very Fast Amiga but still 68k. Like it play this PSX emulator near perfect at that speedrate, that means of course that new Ports of Old games are Possible.

Talkin about "Open TombRaider", "shogo sourcecode", Sin sourcecode... actuelly there are many sourcecodes of older Games.

OR complete new Games are welcome too. I just buyed Heretic2 and Gorky17 as 68k Ports and they are soooo sweet and good.... running like hell. i dont regret the 100euros with package, post etc. would like to buy even more...

WHEN the game is running very good and not half and the game or port is really useful. Like i dont need the 1000 version of solitary or a cheap fast made game for retail price of a new. I buy many games on itch.io for Amiga/c64 when the price is "okay" like 9,99euro for a easy game its okay. Cyberpunks2 i did buy was a little more, but the game is really wroth it ! when i enjoy a demo or game, its more easy to spend more money on it.

I guess Amiga Games should really made by hearth, fun and own enjoyment. To make a real income, you should do like a "patreon" that people support you every month but you give always a progress of the game Else you have to release like every month a new game to keep the income running.


Just my Guess...

@Heimdall

If most A600GS and A1200NG owners bought a game then there would be a notable market for high end titles. The A600GS user base is growing weekly so there will be opportunities for new game development.

We are soon adding AmiStore App Store to the A600GS/A1200NG to encourage users to buy games and support our community developers.

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@Heimdall

Quote:

Heimdall wrote: ... about 500 copies would need to be sold ... Depending on the features and length of the game, range would be $15 - $30.

I think 500 copies is an achievable number, though of course not guaranteed.

Excluding emulation, there is enough hardware out there capable of running Amiga 68k titles at or above 040 25MHz to achieve sales of 500 units, which includes AGA and non-AGA units with Apollo V2/V4 accelerators, and systems with a PiStorm. I would estimate that there are 25k - 30k active and semi-active unique users, maintaining around 50k targetable systems. Add in UAE and now you're talking ~250k active and semi-active unique users capable of running games at 040 25MHz and above.

While many of these people will shell out hundreds of dollars to extend the life of their Amiga systems, they'll not just throw $15-$30 at "NEW" Amiga games. Your success at reaching and even exceeding 500 units would largely depend on the price/quality of the game. Hell, if it's good enough you could sell 500 to just the Apollo 080 market.

If I take myself as an example: I've seen some of these "NEW" Amiga games over the past couple years, and not to diminish the work that goes into developing a game for the Amiga, but all I see is old crap with a new skin, and often an obvious amateur look and feel. My internal monologue asks why should I pay for a crappy rip-off of Superfrog, when I can just play the Superfrog I already have? The NEW game could be a FREE Aminet download, but if it is just a rehash I still wouldn't waste what little spare time I have to download, install, and play.

Ultimately, you are not contending with people's discretionary income, you're contending with their available time. With so many options for entertainment, you need to give 500+ Amiga gamers the reason to not go for one of those other options.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@Heimdall

The Amiga market is simply too small to make any significant money, let alone making a living out of games. Don't be fooled by the numbers of users in this or that forum/social/whatever. Amiga games sell by the hundreds - even the successful ones and even those that come in a physical package (which sell a lot). On top of that, your target machine reduces the number of potential buyers. If you're in first and foremost for fun, personal satisfaction, etc., go for it. Otherwise, you'd better target other platforms.

Managing to sell 500 digital copies in the range of $15-$30 for 68040+ machines is not realistic in my opinion: you'd need to have a real killer game and/or build an incredibly successful hype; not to mention that you'd have to manage to make such a masterpiece in a time frame which is short relatively to the earnings - maths say that even if you made $30*500 = $15000 gross, once you deduct taxes and divide by the number of months of work, the resulting figure wouldn't be that high.

For reference, my game SkillGrid (which is for all AGA Amigas) sold 140 copies on itch.io, for a gross amount of 1152 USD, and some 120 physical copies, which earned me about 5 GBP gross per copy - you're looking at about 1800 USD before the itch.io cut and fees, and taxes. There have been more successful games, but all the figures I've seen are all of the same magnitude.

Last edited by saimo on 13-Feb-2025 at 12:59 AM.
Last edited by saimo on 13-Feb-2025 at 12:36 AM.

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RETREAM - retro dreams for Amiga, Commodore 64 and PC

All the fuzz about 3D - why not start with plain old 2D games on RTG first?

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@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: @Heimdall I'd reach out to the author of Reshoot Proxima 3 to see how much that game targeted on a stock A1200 game sold. Then reduce by a magnitude of 2 for 030/50 target or a magnitude of 4 for Pistorm/080/060 level.

For Reshoot Proxima 3 via https://www.patreon.com/posts/reshoot-proxima-113663409

Marketsize. Before release I thought that shoot-em-up on Amiga is the smallest niche possible, and we should be glad if the game recoups the production costs of the CD-ROMs. But actually, sales were surprising, and revenue was better than my first mobile game "Anno Domini" on iOS.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7950X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

Quote:

DC_Edge wrote: @Heimdall 500 is certainly too optimistic. Maybe bait on hollywood mal to publish on Android then have an amiga version?

What's a hollywood mal ? Typo perhaps ?

Forget about the Android/iOs shovelware market. I'm not wasting my life at that. That's a topic worth a separate thread in itself.
Also, the personal satisfaction - for me - from coding on modern platforms, died somewhere along the DirectX 9 mark. Beyond that HW, it's just unpaid work.

Quote:

BigD wrote: I'd reach out to the author of Reshoot Proxima 3 to see how much that game targeted on a stock A1200 game sold. Then reduce by a magnitude of 2 for 030/50 target or a magnitude of 4 for Pistorm/080/060 level.

Yeah, it's a classic SHMUP title, and for a maximum possible (minus OCS, I think?) HW user-base. And with a retail box. Not a comparable market, basically. But it's nice to have some idea about the market they reached and what's possible, in theory.

I wouldn't dare to risk a physical box for at least first 2 years of release given the brutal OS/HW fragmentation, and thus a need for patches to work around various libraries incompatibilities...

@Bugala

Quote:

Bugala wrote: @Heimdall In PPC Amigas, the sales I would estimate to be somewhere between 100-300 copies for a better game, so less than on classics. But problem with PPC games is that there are so few of them, and there isn't much idea how for example pricing affects them, and the "better ones" have all been digital so far I think, so not sure how selling them physically would affect sales. But, this said, notice the "better game" definition, for there are plenty of games released in Amiga that have sold only few tens of copies to my understanding. While it seems to be possible to sell 1000 copies, it however needs to be a hit game then already. Point with these figures is that I would by quick estimate, based upon these, that 040+ game would have even less a market than PPC Amiga market, but, based upon classics having more market than PPC Amigas, who knows, maybe there are lots of 040 machines that are playing A500 games, and maybe the market would be closer to Classic Amiga market than PPC Amiga market.

I don't have a native PowerPC build yet, so it'd have to run in emulation, but if I spent about ~6 weeks of work, I could have a native PowerPC build of my engine (technical details are in a separate thread). I'd lie if I said I'm not excited about exploring new HW platform! I absolutely want to explore how far can I push the PowerPC RISC in a SW rasterizer! This is like Jaguar's GPU/DSP, but order of magnitude faster ! If that's not exciting, I don't know what is :)

Right now, however, it's a higher priority to get a C2P and 8-bit color modes working for the 040-060, because for now it's running just at 24-bit color depth on Amiga (well, to be exact - V4SA as that's the only HW I have).

@manga303

Quote:

manga303 wrote: @Heimdall i would be intressted very much ! special for new 68k Games that possible with PiSTORM. Just 68040 with 1.5Ghz and 128mb ram so a very very Fast Amiga but still 68k.

This is actually something I'm working on right now - a separate feature set build that is available for WinUAE/PiStorm. You'll have resolutions up to 4k and additional effects that you can turn on depending on speed of the HW.
Example - drawing distance / LOD that would destroy 040, but is fine under WinUAE.
Various Aspect ratios - 4:3, 16:9, 32:9, etc.

I'm testing this using the same TV I play my XBOX on and even at lower resolutions, it's perfectly playable.

Quote:

manga303 wrote: Talkin about "Open TombRaider", "shogo sourcecode", Sin sourcecode... actuelly there are many sourcecodes of older Games. OR complete new Games are welcome too. I just buyed Heretic2 and Gorky17 as 68k Ports and they are soooo sweet and good.... running like hell. i dont regret the 100euros with package, post etc. would like to buy even more...

Sorry, I have no interest in recompiling other games.
I want to create original games that are inspired by other classic titles, but not carbon copies.

Like, right now - my game is heavily inspired by StunRunner. But it's not a StunRunner clone, despite having the ability to fly super-fast. It has a lot of procedural gameplay content. There's plenty RPG elements and it plays like a rouge-like. But there's no permadeath.
While you can choose to play any level at any time, it's in your best interest not to.
So, not a StunRunner even if it looks like one.

This game would provide a fantastic starting point for StarStrike (from ZX Spectrum). There never was such a game on Amiga.

Or the Star Wars (the Arcade and Sega 32X version) - about ~6 months worth of work after releasing this one.


Quote:

manga303 wrote: I guess Amiga Games should really made by hearth, fun and own enjoyment. To make a real income, you should do like a "patreon" that people support you every month but you give always a progress of the game Else you have to release like every month a new game to keep the income running.

I can't imagine a Patreon being an option for game development.

Of course, if I didn't have any enjoyment from coding, I wouldn't get this far.

But to improve my life, it'd be fantastic if I could get rid of my part-time job and work on games full-time, even if I'd make less than 10% of what my carreer pays. That's how crazy I am about this passion

@Heimdall

If you enjoy it like you imply you do, I suggest you create one game with high quality and check the results by yourself. But are you being realistic with the 6 months ? I've had lots of cool ideas and didn't finish most of them, but then again I'm a procrastinator and not a pro either...

_________________

José

@Jose

Quote:

Jose wrote: @Heimdall If you enjoy it like you imply you do, I suggest you create one game with high quality and check the results by yourself. But are you being realistic with the 6 months ? I've had lots of cool ideas and didn't finish most of them, but then again I'm a procrastinator and not a pro either...

You can obviously keep adding features indefinitely and never release anything.

I'm not talking about 6 months starting from scratch. I'm talking about 6 months AFTER you already have an entire game and all the engine components integrated and a proven art tool-chain in place.


For example, take Starstrike from ZX Spectrum. The only missing components (in my engine, right this moment) are these ones, which I estimate at 16 weeks of work (4 months):

Quote:

Create 10 3D enemies (can be low polycount, as there will be 25-50 in a view) Animated Camera Roll along view vector Enemy full rotation + Generic BackFace Culling Rotating Turrets Enemy Waypoint Trajectories Stage: Solar System Map Stage: Hyperspace travel animation Stage: Connector Room with Rotating Forcefield in the center Stage: Space Fight Stage: Support Module: Repair+Refuel Stage: Tunnel with moving obstacles (horizontal/vertical)

I don't believe it's an unreasonable estimate that the above would take me 4 months when coding full-time as most of these things are scripting together of already existing components and there's barely more than 2 weeks of engine feature development there (which is usually the riskiest one in terms of estimates)

Remember, since all code is written by myself, I lose zero time in:
- understanding/integrating somebody else's code.
- resolving GitHub Merge conflicts,
- debugging sudden, random, unexpected behavior which happens when somebody else merges their code.
- coordination with other team members
- waiting till dependencies are implemented (I am the one implementing them)

I would even argue that if there was a second coder, it'd actually take LONGER and as a bonus, there would be more bugs. That is not an exaggeration.

My recent (2023) experience on the Minecraft Team at Microsoft gave me a whole other level of appreciation for coding on my own. Just because Minecraft was a game doesn't mean it wasn't 98% identical to coding a generic backend for a database company (Sprint planning, scrums, architecture meetings, weekend on-call time, late-night hotfixes, constant existential dread due to MSFT constantly appeasing stake holders and trimming the workforce, etc.)
I was so thankful when my 18-month contract was over, as it was a very stresfull job.
The only nice thing I can say about it is that I finally got to use some of the advanced C++ features and be paid for it, that is really all.


Going back to the StarStrike example. Once those features are implemented, I have a similar list for the Star Wars 32X version. It's also only about 4 months long for the code, but there's a lot of art assets there. Admittedly, I could hire a 3D artist to work on them while I implement the features.



Of course, the total amount of coding work on a game like Star Wars 32X is, like, ~3+ years. No argument about that

@amigakit

Quote:

amigakit wrote: @Heimdall If most A600GS and A1200NG owners bought a game then there would be a notable market for high end titles. The A600GS user base is growing weekly so there will be opportunities for new game development. We are soon adding AmiStore App Store to the A600GS/A1200NG to encourage users to buy games and support our community developers.

I'm not against creating a separate build with some exclusive features, as that's historically been proven to be the best motivating factor to buy a game when it's bundled with HW. Whether that's in the form of a separate mini-game, or just gameplay features (say, additional levels/art assets unavailable otherwise) would depend on the effort/timing (if and when it's done).
But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. I currently target mid-June (assuming my current pace of coding remains unimpacted).
 
Can you remind me of what is the MIPS rating of those configs (as that's what matters for a SW rasterizer)? Is that the rPi-based system ? Then it's certainly faster in RTG than 040/060.

@Heimdall

My impressions from what I sold on recent games (and what I got as info from other sources) is:

a) Biggest market is 68030 50 MHz AGA systems
b) Second would be 68040
c) After that probably (not sure) 060+Vampire (Vampire probably biggest)
d) Then PiStorm (though PiStorm market is rising)
e) After that OS4
f) WarpOS last, though especially in Poland and Germany there are quite some users of it

I think the 500 copies depend a lot on the type of game. It needs to be a good title AND a title which supports lowend (for me that is 030/040, or at least 040) systems. The game with the biggest sales I got is more in the region of 200. But those were pretty highend games.

For a developer on the other hand it is sort of upside-down in some parts. OS4 has much better debugging possibilities, and much more libraries supported. I have projects I just cannot do (or where I need to jump through a lot of hoops) on OS3.x. That's why I usually start on the OS4 version first, even if it is one of the smaller markets (also, I like OS 4 ^^).

One title I am working on I tried hard to cover all a)-f), but sadly a) was not really possible. Too slow.

@amigakit

>If most A600GS and A1200NG owners bought a game then there would be a notable market for high >end titles. The A600GS user base is growing weekly so there will be opportunities for new game >development.

There is a big issue also regarding resellers here. Especially for boxed games, if few resellers take the games in stock this is a problem. One which new systems won't fix. I also remember last time I tried to offer games (possibly as some sort of bundle-deal ?) I got no reply.

Many resellers only want to sell hardware and fix old systems against payment. This is bad for software makers. Especially if many resellers only take very small stock and want to put all risk on the side of the producers (not talking specifically about you, I am generally speaking here!)

As to highend titles it also would help to have a 3D Solution for PiStorm. Don't want to start all the discussion again, but not trying to hinder things here would definitely help.

>We are soon adding AmiStore App Store to the A600GS/A1200NG to encourage users to buy games >and support our community developers.

This is a good idea, though it will only help for games which are digital sales.

This asides I would actually be interested if my games run on A600GS (I might have a tester handy, who could try it out).

MagicSN

"I think the 500 copies depend a lot on the type of game"

I was gonna say that too... I personally like classic shoot em ups like Battle Squadron, not sure I'd be interested in a 3d one with too pixelated graphics but then again I'm probably not representative of the majority...

Last edited by Jose on 13-Feb-2025 at 08:00 PM.

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José

@Heimdall

Hollywood multimedia application layer.
A good lua scrupting tool that makes you export your creations on any target you'd like
https://hollywood-mal.com/