The OP is an experience retro game developer, Ralf. He's shifted plenty of boxed copies of his C64 stuff; which is great. So I don't think we need to be lecturing him about expectations.Ralf wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 4:38 pm That's the reality every retro game developer has to face. Your target group are guys in thier 40s/50s who have a lot of worries
in real life, have seen and played hundreds/thousands of games already, get quite a lot of new games for retro platforms
regularly and simply don't get so much excited about a new game like kids.
I spend a lot of time in different communities for various 8-bit machines and I would say that there are different levels of engagement and responses across them. Different communities support different levels and different sorts of activities... The C64 one, for instance, has a very active new boxed software scene and supports several printed fanzines. Doesn't necessarily mean it's better but it is different. There seems to be quite a willingness to pay for new software over there. On the other hand, they also have a huge "cracking" scene which often seems quite weird to us Spectrum users.
So... it was a genuine question to the OP. What sort of response were you after? Presumably you would've seen a different response to the project on the C64 side of things where you are very well established. The Spectrum gets a lot of small, bite-sized, arcade games regularly released so it is hard to grab eyeballs on that sort of project.