Are you suggesting the Frieden brothers have been working for free of all along
What I'm suggesting is that the Frieden brothers has gotten whatever money they receive at the end of each month from elsewhere.
how could you possibly know?
Hyperion is a microscopic game porting company that has no products, no real business, and I seriously doubt they have made any serious money at all during the last decade. And with serious money I mean enough to support a couple of full time employees (let alone some 30+ or whatever being claimed occasionally), with salaries, taxes and/or whatever social welfare fees of their country, every month, for a decade. Do the math. Two SW engineers (including taxes) requires margins from sales of at least 1,000,000-1,500,000 EUR for a decade. It's not plausible; somehow I doubt "Gorky 17 for Linux" was (and is!) *that* successful. But by all means, feel free to post a copy of their latest financial report here and prove me wrong. I'm sure it's possible to request it from somewhere. Didn't they change their corporate entity from an unlimited to a limited form some year ago after all? AFAIK, in most countries this means much more rigorous requirements for accounting, financial reports, audits, as well as making this kind of information more accessible to the public.
The figure of 130 sales seems a little pessimistic, a recent survey on Aw.net shows 275 members intending to buy the X1000
275?! Well, it's all fine and dandy then! (Just kidding of course!)
No seriously, what that survey measures (as well as the beta tester inquiry), is how many people bothered to respond to a mail or to a poll. What those "surveys" *doesn't* measure, is how many people that will actually cash up UKP 1,500++/USD 2,400++/EUR 1,700++ for the thing! Real, hard-earned money, in real life! If *only* 275 people bothered to answer to a poll (which most people in Amiga-land do just for political reasons, to make a statement, or to show some support, or numerous other "false" reasons), something that is close to effortless and completely free of charge, then I think it would actually be *optimistic* to think that as many as half of those will actually follow through in real life. It's not peanut money, and the hardware is unproven and nothing spectacular in any way. Ah well, time will tell. But the point is that they could multiply that figure many times over simply by making their OS accessible in a broad scale on mainstream HW, even so if only targeted towards mainstream *PPC* HW...
