Question 1&2 : Please select the types of games you are interested in.
My sincerest apologies, in leaving out flight sims, this will be addressed in a future poll.

The number of responses to the first two questions were by and large the most responded to section of the Poll, interestingly, the results are aligned with the European PC market. 
Would the poll have given different results on console/world market? I'm sure it would have. 
Coming back however, most of the votes were cast for 3D perspective games such as Quake and Heretic II, with 11% quickly followed jointly by The point and click adventure type game and the Strategic overhead warfare sim genre. This was separated from the Settlers/Foundation type game as they really are different enough in terms of gameplay to warrant seperate entries.
Bubble Heroes type games and Platformers such as Aladdin have fallen way out of fashion with today's Amiga games players, ending up joint bottom of the pile, which is a shame because I can't recommend this game highly enough. 

The survey highlights or rather doesn't, show that there could be a disparity between On-line Amigans and those without net access. Take the case in point, the shoot-em up type games such as T-Zero, which sold nearly 1500 units for an AGA only game and polled 188 votes compare that to Bubble Heroes with 111 votes and which to date, has sold a miserly 250 copies. 
One could conclude that perhaps those who responded to the survey have the best hardware and therefore want to play the games that take advantage of that. If you are a developer take heed, people want to play the "en vogue" games and therefore you should be aiming to target your products to where the market wants to go.

Question 3: What machine spec should developers be aiming for? (CD-ROM only)

This question, re-enforces the argument above about people only wanting products that pushes every last pixel out of the Amiga's PowerPC accellerators and graphics cards, echoing the PC user/games player ethos.

The clear winner was the Phase 5 Cards with a whopping 31% of you wanting software that utilisises that hardware to the full. Second place with 21% went to the dreamers who want stuff for the G3/G4 cards. Interestingly, 17% of respondants wanted Amiga Developers to concentrate on the Amiga DE and forget the legacy/Classic market.  A view that I share, it is time to embrace the new,  I am well aware that not everyone shares this sentiment so perhaps in the future the Amiga community will split again, such is the nature of the beast. 
Finally, only a miserly 1% said that they wouldn't buy any more games for the Amiga. Afore that, you will notice that only 3% of you wanted stuff at the bare 68040 levels or below. So clearly the havenots are a small minority on the .net. 

Question 4: Which of these recent games have you bought?

A good gauge as to the current spending trends amongst the netted Amiga buying public. Surprise! the top answer was NONE! Yes, out of the 1008 replies to this 366 of you haven't bought any of the latest releases which if you are a developer/publisher/retailer is very worrying.

On the actual games bought, the top of the heap prize with 188 votes, went to WipeOut 2097, a game that was released just in time for Chrimbo last year ('99). Second to that came Heretic II another super hardware banging game, which still hasn't sold in large enough numbers for Hyperion to recoup their costs. (WipeOut 2097 has had a year on sale, so let's hope that it has secured enogh money for the developer and publisher.) Once more it's interesting to see that the lower spec games have not fared very well, with Hellsquad, Bubble Heroes, Tales from heaven and Virtual ball fighters scoring very low in this part of the survey.

Question 5: Which of these planned releases do you REALLY plan on buying?

Much better response on this one, well without a doubt, the game that most of you really want to play is Explorer 2260. Ed Collins really knows how to make a community drool at loverly screenshots!  Sadly, the World Foundry fell apart recently, but Ed and a couple of other coders remain determained to complete the game. Having spoken to Ed a while back (nice chap) the problem is whether to release the game for the Classic Amiga or port it over to the Amiga DE. A game as ambitious as Explorer 2260 requires a lot of development time, andit may find that it "gates" in to a very small hard core Classic owners market where the majority may have migrated down the Amiga DE path. It's a tough one to call, good luck guys, hope the expectations of the Amiga community (which ever form) is met once the game is released.

In Second place, and encouraging for Hyperion, Shogo is a very much anticipated release, but the one that really excites me is one in 5th place, Payback, which received 14% of the popular vote. This is the only top 5 title that although, based on other games, is 100% original to the Amiga or indeed, to any other plaform. If you ask the average Amiga user what type of game they prefer, they always bemoan the lack of original games. Look at this part of the survey and you will find that most of the titles featuered are from other platforms. - It's nice to have originality.
Lastly, Fubar which came in last, has, so rumour has it, been cancalled for the Classic Amiga and the programmers are now working to bring it out for the Amiga DE only due to lack of interest.

Question 6a: Piracy - Amiga users
Piracy, on the Amiga, is it rife or has the message been drummed home? Sadly, I think not, here are the results for Piracy on the Amiga games front.

Well actually you would be quite wrong.

Remember at the start of the survey, I said 2050 people had taken part, in the survey? This breaks down to the following.
Q1&2 A total of 3472 votes were cast, this is because multiple voting was enabled.
Q3 A total of 1193 votes were cast out of 2050 (close enough) on the Machine spec question.
Q4 A total of 1008 votes were cast for this question which dealt with recently bought games. Does this mean that over half of respondants don't buy games? If so are they getting pirate copies?
Q5 A total of 1575 votes were cast for the type of game people were planning to buy, of course the missing 475 replies may not know what they want, cannot afford to buy any games or are planning to not pay for them. Your guess is as good as mine.
Q6 A total of (cue drum roll...........) 781 votes cast. Why? Out of 2050 replies, did 1269 people chose not to answer this question? The only conclusion I can reach is that people thought or feared that their email address or identity would be stored if they answered this particular part of the survey. Of course It wasn't, the survey was purely 100% annonymous.
Perhaps piracy on the Amiga is still very rife and that the 95% that was recorded against piracy would in fact have become a very small minority had everyone had the courage to answered this question.

Conclusions
People want to see great PPC games... they also prefer PC conversions rather than original games (and this may not be bad in your opinion, but it is in mine). At first galance Piracy does not seem to play a very big role in the current Amiga market but the low number of replies to the piracy question is very worrying.

Developing great games requires a lot of time and effort, which with the current Amiga Market, cannot really be justified. However, people have been saying this about the Amiga market for years, yet still, new games appear regularly. This year 2000 alone has seen more titles appear than in previous years. I can't remember them all, but Heretic II, Nightlong, HellSquad, Bubble Heroes, Virtual Ball Fighters, Tales from Heaven, and hopefully joined by the xmas releases of Simon The Sorceror II and Exodus and don't forget Quake which went open source earlier this year with PPC ports, replacing the poor, but valiant Clickboom attempt.

Unless sales pick up, which let's face it, isn't likely to happen on the Classic platform, more developers will go under.
Developing PPC games in the magnetude of Heretic II, Shogo, or Wipeout 2097 i'm sure, is no small task. It requires lots of manhours work on 100's of Megabytes of effort.Add the cost of obtaining a license for x game and you end up with a huge bill that you may not re-coup. - Bankruptcy is sure to follow.

Only people who develop for the love of the Amiga i.e the semi-professional or hobbystic developer, doing something in their spare time, can afford to take a gamble on the Amiga, If you are one of those, don't expect to get rich or even break even. Ever.

In closing, the Amiga market is small, very small, piracy appears to be rife, and according to an earlier poll on Amihoo half of us a re tigt fisted misers, yet we still see many new titles appear annually. If you are one of these people who are developing for the Classic Amiga, seriosly consider developing for the Amiga DE instead. At any rate I raise my glass and say thank you for keeping the dream alive, we wouldn't be all here without you. I hope you will still be here this time next year, when hopefully Bill and Fleecy's Amiga Adventure^TM becomes a reality.

It has been an interesting, if not uneventful twelve months. I hope that in another twelve I am writing an article that will be positive throughout and hopefully on a new machine bearing the Amiga name and running the Amiga DE.

What are your thoughts on this? I would like to be proved wrong and if you have a better theory, please email me at mikeyc@amihoo.com Your email will be kept confidential if you wish, otherwise I will publish your thoughts on the talkback section and who knows you could win some cash!

Regards
Mikey C
Special thanks to Andrea Morolli for his valuable insight and contribution.

Some of your Comments left on the Poll

• .....I really want to upgrade to PPC but would prefer to buy a new unit (eg the new amiga out next year)
  
• .....I'd really like a decent flight sim to make use of BVision upwards 3D cards.
  
• .....I miss one type of game in the wanted list: The Wingcommander style, or spaceflighsimms in general
  
• .....Pretty vague poll.
  
• .....Interesting and constructive survey,I hope you can help the Amiga comunity as I´d like it.
  
• .....quite good idea
  
• .....I've bought OnEscapee & Wasted Dreams - Great!!
  
• .....35% having bought none of the games listed is quite worrying
  
• .....interesting, but it is only a survey.... I want to see some radical steps now :)
  
• .....What is happening about Dark Millennia? Anyone know? Haven't heard anything in ages
  
• .....More games should be listed in the "Which of these games have you bought" section...