yeah theres more than a few people in this forum who have them and wont share them, and alot are hypocrites about it because they dont own every game, but they do have the roms. one of these days (maybe not for a few years, but eventually) theres goning to be someone with a proto and a dumper and they’re not going to share it with you all, and you’ll think “what a @ssh0le,” and then you will see it from everyone elses perspective.
ps. i also think thats really gay. =)
Post Edited (03-04-05 01:20)
The reason people with the ROMs don’t share is because the people that they get (begged) the carts from are usually collectors, and they don’t want the value of their cart to go down (it’ll go down if anyone can play the game, nobody is going to pay $1000 for a game that they can just download), so the only way they’ll allow the cart to be dumped is if they can guarantee that the ROM will always be kept private.
Personally, I half agree with the logic… I mean I’d love for everything to be public and anyone can play any game, but if someone wants to play a game bad enough, dish out the cash… oh, and since you now own the game, dump it and release the ROM! (yeah, right). Honestly, none of the rare games are worth their price (notice how the 4 expensive games happen to be the 4 that aren’t available to download). I guess some are fun, but none are worth more than $50 for the game itself.
And there are people with protos, and they’re not willing to share the ROMs, so we all do know how it feels to want something, but can’t have it. And no, there are no IRC channels that have the unavailable ROMs for download.
o_O I’m a ROM Nazi? Controlling whether or not you can illegally pirate games? What obligation does anyone have to you to give you a dump of a game that you don’t own? What I said is completely true… the person who dumped the rare games borrowed them from a collector who paid LOTS of money to have a complete collection, and those were the owner’s rules. The person who dumped the games had two options, either dump the carts and keep them private, or not dump them…
Feel free to buy the carts, dump them, then sell off your carts again… if you can get the same amount of money back after the ROMs are public, then you just got a free dump of the ROMs, but look at the values of every other game before it’s been dumped and after, the value drops drastically. That happened with Space Squash and Insmouse in the Virtual Boy world, but I’m talking more generally, such as Earthbound 0, Dreamcast protos (Half-Life, Prop Arena), and lots of others. Collectors are strange people… they want to have something that nobody else has… if every bum on the internet can play a game, they’re not interested, but if they can be one of the few to be able to play the holy grail of a system, they’ll pay BIG for it.
I’m not trying to be a dick about it, I’m just trying to explain why the “real owners” don’t want the ROMs available on all the ROM sites.
“nobody is going to pay $1000 for a game that they can just download”
No. Sure, releasing the roms may decrease the value of the games somewhat, but this statement just isn’t true. For the most part the people who buy games for that much are the collectors. The kind of collectors who don’t even play the games. Releasing the roms to people who would never pay the collector prices isn’t going to make much of a difference. EDIT: Or it shouldn’t, crazy backwards collectors.
Just look at the Neo Geo collectors market. There is this one rare game, well, the game itself isn’t really all that rare, it’s widely available in various forms(MVS and AES and the corresponding regions for each) and the rom certainly is no chore to find. However for some reason the European AES release of the game is extremely rare. And despite the wide availability of games that are pretty much identical beyond the packaging and format, the rare version still fetches rediculous prices. I think the last one went for about $12,000.
The point is, the games in question aren’t valuable because they’re rare and people want to play them. They’re mostly valuable because they’re so rare and not too much else. Unless the VB market is so messed up that people are willing to pay those prices just because they want to play the game. And in that case… 0_o
If you had just left it at “The collectors will be mad if we do anything that might possibly decrease the value of their games” I wouldn’t have said anything.
EDIT: Okay, so maybe the VB market is affected by roms more than I would have thought… I haven’t been following the collectors scene really. But hasn’t the market been steadily decreasing for awhile now? And not just the games with the released roms, I mean like all of it. Doesn’t seem like any of the rare stuff on ebay now is selling…
Post Edited (03-05-05 09:29)
It’s not so much that people pay $1000 to play a game, it’s more that collectors will pay $1000 to own a game that almost nobody has played. And yes, rare VB carts seem to be dropping in value, but when the ROMs of the semi-rare games were released, their prices dropped a lot (they were going for around $300, they dropped to about $100).
It is a really weird market… even though emulation isn’t that great, and there’s no sound (not worth listening to anyway 😉 ), somehow those 4 games have become the holy grails of VB collecting, since they’re what everyone wants, but only a few have.
I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway, the person who dumped the carts isn’t going to release them, since they made an agreement with the owner (s?) of the carts not to, and it’s their choice to make. But at least you agree that the value will drop, and if the value is going to drop, the collector that was generous enough to allow the cart dumped wouldn’t appreciate a massive drop in the value of their collection for being nice.
It has nothing to do with the companies… it has to do with the rightful owners of the carts that were dumped. I’m sure that they would have liked to have gotten the games for free (instead of almost $3000 worth of carts), but instead they bought the carts. For that, they get to have something that only them and a few other people have. If the games get dumped, and the ROMs released, their really expensive games drop in value (less buyers, since some people would be happy enough buying something else with the money and just playing it on an emulator/flash cart), especially Virtual Bowling and SD Gundam, and they lose at least $1000 in worth of their carts.
I completely understand their point, I’ve seen it many times, and it’s been argued tons of times whether releasing ROMs lowers values, and I have never seen one come out where people agree that releasing a ROM doesn’t affect the original’s value. You just have to look at it from the original owner’s point of view… what does that person have to gain from the release of their ROM? If they knew that their cart was going to be dumped and released, they wouldn’t have let it get dumped in the first place. I’m sure it was hard enough to mail something that expensive to someone you’ve only met over the internet anyway, and then the risk of it being damaged in the dumping process.
It would affect the owners, when they try to sell their carts. Look for previous examples of where this has happened. Every prototype that I know of, the games like I already mentioned in my previous post(s), and just look around for other examples. Obviously people will still buy the games, but they won’t be willing to spend as much on it as they would if it were the “only one”, or “only few”.
Right, they’re not prototypes, but they’re rarer than some prototypes, so it similarly applies. There are very few games for any system that were released, but are so rare that very few people have them, and that one of the ROM releasing groups couldn’t get ahold of one to dump and release. These games are so rare that for the first few years nobody even know whether they actually existed (read some old VB sites, they always talk about rumors of these games existing). And like I said, Space Squash and Insmouse values plummeted when their ROMs were released.
Hm, that’s probably a part of why the values of the rare games have been decreasing, people have figured out that they’re not so rare as they once seemed.
Yeah, I actually remember visiting some of those old VB sites when they were still new. I can distinctly recall hearing about a rare Japanese game that at the time was translated to “In Mouse’s House.” Good times. At least we still dream about copies of Bound High, Zero Racers, Faceball, and Dragon Hopper eventually being released in some form…
Oh, and Heppner, lay off on the roms. The current owners have legitimate reasons to not want them released publically given the odd nature of the VB market. Just wait, they’ll be released eventually, I can practically guarantee it. It might just be a few years…
