The ZX Spectrum Next vs The Mega65 Computer

It would seem that, from far fewer sales, the MEGA65 is doing better than the ZX Spectrum Next, at least on one metric.

Whether you grew up with Sinclair's rubber-clad monolith, in the form of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, or you were firmly in the Commodore camp with your C64, you are kind of spoilt now in the next gen machines available, with the Sinclair-branded ZX Spectrum Next and MEGA65 (M65) being two of the most prominent platforms your money can buy.

From what I can garner, about 8,500 real Next machines exist in the form of the KickStarter models, and probably a couple of thousand more N-Go FPGA variants. The M65 computer isn't doing quite as well, with perhaps aronud 1,000 sales, but it is a much more expensive alternative, and I expect that sales of the Ultimate 64 (U64) would be about equivalent to that of the Next, but the U64 is sold as a board and one must provide a casing and keyboard, as well as the Kernal, BASIC and character ROMs in software form.

Anyway, to the point: at the time of writing, and that is 2025-02-27, the Next has 118¹ pieces of entertainment software available for it (discounting, of course, the many thousands of compatible titles), many of which are still listed as "In development", whereas the M65 has 123², albeit that the development status is unclear and some of those 123 games may be early alpha releases for demonstration purposes. This is rather curious to me; how can something with a clearly much smaller market have an equivalent software library - in terms of entertainment software at least - of something presumabely much more popular?

Unless I spent my time doing thorough research into this topic, I don't think I will ever know. But I suspect that my conjecture that the Next is trying to please everyone but ends up pleasing no one, or at least not a significant number of users, is part of the issue. The potential market for the Next is many thousands, but that's no good if most of those people are just using it as a ZX Spectrum and not taking advantage of the platform's full potential. Whereas I'm guessing that people who own the M65 are doing so out of a curiosity of the unfinished Commodore C65 which exists in equivalent numbers (in theory, some units will have been lost to time) to the current number of M65s out in the wild.

And as for the aforementioned U64, I'll get onto that in good time, but I can say that it's a beautiful computer which very faithfully replicates the C64, but does much more.

^{1) ZX Spectrum Next software directory
2) MEGA-65 File Host}