AmigaOne X1000, Amiga OS 4.1.x, & Gaming

[spirantho]

Trust me, it's about market size.
To recoup on total costs you need to sell several hundred thousand units, or at least many tens of thousands.
Now consider the size of the Amiga market. If an Amiga model sells well it'll sell a few thousand units. On a really good return you may get a quarter of that buying your game. Launch products are made where the projected sales are at least a million these days.

As you can see, getting a game made specifically for the Amiga is suicide. Your only hope is getting a company to port from the Mac on the cheap (no DirectX), and even then you are talking tens of thousands quite possibly.

In other words, it's just not viable for a niche platform to have games written professionally.

Also, there is no proper developers environment like MSDev or even Eclipse.

Plus, the fact is that  all our hardware is very slow these days, when compared to x86 Macs and PCs.

There is no way I'm afraid you will be able to use your x1000 for gaming unless it homebrew or open source, same as every other amigaoid platform.

[spirantho]

Speaking as the owner and director of a games company, I can tell you now there is no way I would consider writing just for AmigaOS unless someone was paying me up front, because the numbers are just far too small. If you can get me £100,000 I'll get the guys started on a small game if you like, that should cover about 12 months work (as we're a very small company so we're very cheap compared to most) so we should be able to get a nice little game up.

Of course for your £100,000 you'll probably see sales - if we do a REALLY successful game - of about £10,000.

You might have a hard time getting financing with those numbers.

Honestly, I'm as pro-Amiga as anyone but seriously, the days of the Amiga as a commercial gaming platform are long gone. Heck, I wouldn't even want to do a game on the PC, which is a billion times the bigger platform, because there's no point - you can get much more return on a 360 or PS3.
For gaming, consoles have taken over the market.

[spirantho]

If I'm a developer, which platform/s am I likely to develop for?

This makes me think of the fantastic Zero Mostel/Gene Wilder film "The Producers".

I'll write a game for you, sure. And if you pay me £1000 I'll give you 10% of all the profits. Then I just need to keep doing that for another 100 people and I'm rich!

Any takers? Go on, you know you want to....!

[spirantho]

I think you're underestimating how much work is involved in porting to a new platform.
Put it this way:
Estimated cost to port: $10,000
estimated return on investment: $1000

Developing a commercial game on the Amiga is tantamount to charity, I'm afraid. There is just no business sense at all.
If you want to spend several thousand on getting a game written then great, but no company will.