The rise and fall of the ZX Spectrum games market. I decided to chart, year by year, the Spccy gaming output of 10 publishers I regard as the major full-price labels... - ThreadSky

reheatedpixels.com • 1 day ago

The rise and fall of the ZX Spectrum games market.

I decided to chart, year by year, the Spccy gaming output of 10 publishers I regard as the major full-price labels...

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sloanysoft.itch.io•1 day ago

Interesting to see the market holding out in 1990 pretty much matching 1989s sales.

"All" really were the most successful software house by a long way.

nomenluni.bsky.social•1 day ago

Hewson were by far the best and most consistently brilliant software house of that era. No other company comes close for the amount of amazing games they published. Ocean and US Gold may have released many more games than them, but for every good game they released, there was at least one bad one.

reheatedpixels.com•1 day ago

Hewson, famously, eschewed licenses. It's all original creations from them. Which is admirable, but by the late 80s, the full-price market had steered into that territory (especially for coin-op conversions)...

reheatedpixels.com•1 day ago

and Hewson's fortunes heavily declined, with the founder Andrew Hewson selling off the back catalogue bit by bit to magazines for covertape inclusions.

nomenluni.bsky.social•1 day ago

Yes, I remember. From the period between 1984 and 1988 though, practically every game they made was a classic. Like you said, they were all originals, with no licences or conversions.

reheatedpixels.com•1 day ago

1982: 4
1983: 31
1984: 45
1985: 55
1986: 92
1987: 108
1988: 95
1989: 53
1990: 54
1991: 28
1992: 7
1993: 2

reheatedpixels.com•1 day ago

I think it's a fairly accurate depiction that the full price market peaked in 1987. That really does seem like the ZX Spectrum's commercial heyday. The 128K range had properly been established. Coin-op conversions were doing great.

reheatedpixels.com•1 day ago

Sure, the Amiga and the Atari ST had been out for a couple of years by then, but they cost a squillion quid at that point. Consoles weren't really a worry for the 8-bit home computer market.

chinnyvision.bsky.social•1 day ago

But there's a lot of consolidation after '87 with companies concentrating on licenses rather than original titles so you might find that companies like Ocean are putting out less titles because they are concentrating on stuff they have spent their money on.

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