Making a new Video Game

Well, it depends on what your goal is. If your thinking of earning thousands of dollars/euros/whatever, than MSX may be a too small scene. If you are going for money, the mobile market would be a better place.

I just want to echo what was just said. I can also give you some numbers, as I have published a few MSX games in the past, and also I have talked to other people that have published:
- My games sell between 50 - 100 physical copies each.
- I give away the games in digital version for free, so that might lower the sales (but I do it since I don't care about the money, and the physical edition sells for money, since it costs money to do it).
- Other groups that do larger/better games than mine, and that do not make their games freely available can sell up to 200-250 copies per game from what I have heard.
- There might be isolated huge-hit titles with more sales than that, but those are the general numbers.

So, there you go. That's your market. I personally think that if you are in for the money, then the retro scene in general is not the right place. This is more a scene of people that do things for the love we still feel toward these machines, not for making money

If you come to ask here, I think most of us will say yes. If you ask some outsider they most likely say no. As a hobby people put effort to lots of things... Some people use their few 10's of hours in garage tuning their cars and newer get their money back they pour in their projects. Some people do skydiving and some people just take their money to local bar and spend their time there drinking beer with friends. The answer to question is it worth it can be found only from the mirror. At least MSX is relatively cheap hobby that still allows creativity and challenges you to push your self against limits. There are many different reasons to do that, but I would say among the most popular thoughts are: "this was my first computer", "I love games and challenges" and "MSX is a simple system that individual can master from start to end while it yet has flexibility to grow with the skills"

The greatest reward comes from the success, but you have to realize that in the end you are the one who will love your project over anyone else and that needs to be the forward driving force. If your motivation is money, eternal fame or something else like that you are most likely going to fail... or at least get very disappointed.

I would say active MSX hobbyists are mostly divided to collectors, people who enjoy to refresh their childhood memories and programmers. New indie games don't fit extremely well to any of these user categories, but there is small interest in all of them.

I think this is again mostly up to you... In 90's everyone was doing MSX2 games n' stuff and nobody remembered MSX1 anymore. This changed on beginning of millennium and next 10 years it was pretty much MSX1 only. Now we have seen few MSX2 projects to pop up again, but MSX2+ and MSX tR has newer been popular.

People tend to say that targeting these high end models will limit the audience, but then again when you ask what computer they have, you will notice that if the people are still active MSX users they have acquired top end model at some point. In reality most of the people are playing on emulators where all models are available and real computer is started only once in a while. I would say that you will lose some customers due to high end targeting, but the other side of the coin is that because there has been so little amount of releases to these machines, people probably buy pretty much any product if someone just releases something... Do you want 20% of 80% or 80% of 20% is up to you. (Numbers are used for illustration purposes only and are not based on anything)

{hamlet: I'm sorry guys, this looks like another spamer. I've blocked the poster}

too many spammers flooding the forum lately... would it be worth to add some kind of captcha on new user registrations?
maybe kind of MSX captcha, like selecting a games from he list which use SCC (inspired by online chess sites captcha where you should solve a trivial chess problem when you register)

EDIT: just because i think that's some clever bots. wouldn't help if real people are posting this bs