I don't think its got anything to do with game development being hard. Spectrum games were hard to develop, but games were cheap(er) and easily copyable, and on

I don't think its got anything to do with game development being hard. Spectrum games were hard to develop, but games were cheap(er) and easily copyable, and one company didn't have a monopoly on production, I assume the same dynamic existed for the C64 also. I suppose you could make the case that game development is always going to be hard, people are always going to push the abilities of the platform etc, it isn't like todays titles are tossed out on a weekly basis.