What with all the layoffs across the games industry to compensate for rampant budgetary overspending in publishing, the reality behind keeping retro games within a paid walled garden is about charging new money for old rope and controlling the market to force gamers to play new games.
The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases, which is uniquely stupid.
I mean, while this stance is obviously shitty and anti-consumer, it’s also not entirely wrong. Retro games are cool, and there sure are a lot of them. If you considered the quality and enjoyment factor of every game to be the same, it actually would be a pretty silly proposition to buy new games on new consoles compared to playing the older stuff.
Heck, I picked up a retro handheld and got my rom sets sorted out not too long ago and yeah, my gaming time has skewed way more heavily towards that older stuff and my spending on newer games has dropped off a cliff in a big way.
But of course, thats not entirely the fault of the retro games - the new games are not really offering the same type of enjoyment, are they? I mean after all, the reason a PS5 game costs 500x more to develop and needs brand new hardware and subscription fees and a digital only license that let’s them remotely shut the game off at any time is clearly because the new games are at least 500x better, right?? I mean surely it’s not like the industry has been completely gutted and cannabilized by the suits at the top in favor of naked profit grabbing at the expensive of any of the creativity and joy that devs used to put in their games, right?
Like, wandering around the fields in Ocarina of Time is maybe not quite as cool and immersive as the huge open worlds of Horizon: Zero Dawn. But is it 500x less cool? If I told you one can play on your phone, your tablet, your laptop, hell your watch practically, and the data file is small enough to send via email, oh and plus it’s freely available with minimal effort, but the other needs a 500 dollar box to run, the game is 70, some features don’t work without a 15/mo subscription, and it will only ever run on that one box and you can’t share it with your friends. Hell you could get the one game on real retro hardware for probably 50 bux soup to nuts. Like yeah, I really feel like retro games probably are hurting modern game sales, but mainly because modern games have become an obvious and icky cash grab that prioritize maximizing revenue and attention time at the expense of fun or entertainment value.
Obviously games as a product have always been moving that direction, so no game is fully immune, but they at least used to try and hide it, or pull you in with the cool creative parts so the corpos could shave off their fat share of the profits in the process. Now it just feels like there is so much momentum in the
community that people just feel compelled to keep up with buying the new stuff, but I think people are starting to ask themselves why. And I think the answers they are getting back are getting thinner and thinner every day.I’ve always said I am just surprised how bad these companies are at leveraging these back catalogs. I mean who knows, maybe the licensing issues are just way more insurmountable than we could ever imagine from the outside, but it just feels like such a waste of so much good art. Like, Nintendo’s virtual console - yeah I’d probably pay 5 bux a piece for digital versions of NES, SNES, and N64 games - if I knew I was actually going to own that game the same way I own a physical game. But they fumbled the bag so hard every single time they’ve put out a new system since then, completely shitting the bed on any kind of transfer option, or any way at all to feel like these are “digital assets” instead of just a movie theater ticket where you can gaze at their works briefly before they inevitably pull the rug out and shuffle you down the hall to another room with the same ticket price again. When, again, the alternative, is that you can fit an entire complete rom set of every obscure NES game ever made into a 50mb zip file and run it on the screen on your smart toaster. Like, they’ve made the choice really easy for a lot of people, and the answer is not “oh goody I’ll just pay them a subscription fee for the rest of forever to play a tiny curated slice of that library only on one particular piece of branded hardware (as long as they dein that I have the right to do so)”. And really, they have handled the retro back-catalog the best out of any of the major platform owners (xbox back-compat notwithstanding).
Like, maybe if they just tried to make makes that are enjoyable rather than just games that are profitable, maybe they could actually be both enjoyable and profitable, instead of only the latter. Or maybe if they just made the older games available in some kind of reasonable, same, fair way instead of either ignoring their existence or blatantly cash-grabbing to the max at every possibility, they could continue to make money on these older games instead of just driving what could be a huge and enduring customer base straight to the high seas where things are easy, loose, and just enjoyable without such huge pointless hassles wrapped around every aspect of the process.
Anyways, no I’m not bitter or anything, why do you ask?
The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
Ah yes heaven forbid games be used for recreational purposes instead of as profit driving engines. This is the problem with capitalism, it takes every single thing in the world and abstracts it’s value into profit
The state of this industry really gets to me. I don’t even hardly game anymore. I’ve broken my brain so badly I can’t seem to enjoy them without a constant looming existential dread that I’m failing to do other more important things.
But I learned to code when I was a fucking TODDLER and all I EVER WANTED was to join a studio and make sick ass games. Then the EA Spouses letter was released and I realised that the dream would in actuality be a goddamn nightmare. Then I learned even more, about capitalism and work and life has been one miserable fucking slog without even my old comfort of gaming to soothe my intrusive sense of fucking failure.
Fuck them. Pirate everything. If you take it, it is yours.
Time to get off my ass and grab as many roms and isos as I can before they actually manage to scrub them for good.
Any guidance for where to do such a thing? Seems like a lot of the retro stuff would be small enough to store locally without an issue, might as well grab it while it’s possible
There’s quite a few good places to download ROMs from:
Vimm’s Lair have a lot of games, but downloads are slow.
The GitHub hosted page from r/roms megathread is great and have a lot of stuff with direct downloads, it is the most complete and has basically anything you might want.
Archive.org page of ROMs verified to work with RetroAchievements. (If you’re lost and don’t know how to access or download the ROMs, just click the show all button on the right. You’ll probably need an account to download anything tho).
NoPayStation for PSP, PSVITA and PS3 games, updates and DLC. It downloads content directly from Sony’s CDN.
WiiUDownloader for Wii U games, updates and DLC. It downloads content directly from Nintendo’s CDN.
NXBrew for Switch games. I’m not a big fan of this one, but it’s the best one I found. I just suggest you use uBlock Origin and ViolentMonkey with this script if you want to use this one.
I think that’s basically it. I have been downloading a bunch of ROMs lately, so that’s basically all I have gathered so far.
Now for storage, it only really becomes a problem with PS3, Xbox 360 and Switch games since there are a lot of really big games there. And the worst part if that you can’t really compress these games right now, so, big storage is the only solution.
For other systems, you can usually compress .cue and .iso files into .chd files and most emulators will work with it. If you do a little research you’ll find more about this.
Gamecube and Wii games can be compressed into .rvz files inside the Dolphin emulator.
And there’s also DS and 3DS games where you can’t compress, but you can trim the ROMs since it usually contain a lot of garbage data that is useless to running the game, just don’t use it on ROM Hacks, because it might make them stop working.
Amazing! Thanks for tapping me in
There’s also cdromance which in addition to just roms also has pre-patched roms with mods, hacks, fan translations, undubs, etc
torrents are a great way to grab entire catalogues of vintage games
I recently grabbed every NES/SNES/N64 game ever published in about two hours
Where’s a safe place for that. I’ve only used fit girl as of the last couple years but otherwise haven’t torrented since like 2010
try a dht crawler (e.g. bitsearch . to) and then search for something like “playstation” or “1g1r” or “no-intro” and other similar terms. Sorting by file size tends to yield collections.
Caveat emptor, since you’re going to be using a torrent and you need to have all the precautions that go with that.
What are the precautions these days? Is VPN enough?
That, and knowing how to use it, is mostly what I had in mind. But it’s also worth just being aware of bad torrents. If you are downloading a full PS1 collection and it’s 14MB and has a .exe in it… that kind of thing.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
Aside from obvious stuff like, fuck IP and you aren’t entitled to customers, there’s also this:
Nobody makes these games anymore.
When I was a kid I loved Mega Man Battle Network. You know when they last released one? 2008.
I also loved Mega Man Legacy, last entry was in 2000.
They don’t make these anymore.
The closest we’ve seen is One Step From Eden and it’s a fast paced combat only roguelike from an indie studio. I still bought and enjoyed it, idk maybe if a major legacy studio would make games like the ones they don’t want to let people access instead of timed dopamine release triggering addiction machines designed to sell loot boxes they wouldn’t have to worry so much about “piracy.”
I think if copyright is going to exist you should have a requirement to make the copyrighted works available, otherwise you lose the copyright.
Copyright is supposed to be a temporary exclusive right to sell a work in order to profit from the production of the work. If you’re no longer selling it, you lose that right.
The audacity for these motherfuckers in executive positions to claim ownership of inaccessible media created by teams of workers who slaved out of love to produce these works, who did that work well before these executives got shuffled into this or that company, who failed to preserve access to the productive output of those workers who have no doubt long since been laid off or died of stress.
THESE GAMES ARENT THEIRS TO DICTATE TERMS OF ACCESS OVER. I DON’T CARE WHAT IP LAW SAYS. ITS ALL SP**KS (I meant it in the Stirner sense damnit) ANYWAY.
Yeah good luck suing roms off the internet because it’s never going to happen. People are going to want to play retro games in the same way that readers enjoy the classics.
good luck suing roms off the internet
Yep. They tried for years and failed while the law was on their side. The laws might change but the resilience of data is immutable. Sue one and five more sites pop up the next day. Archivers do it for love while these ghouls only care about money and line go up. They will always lose, so I don’t understand why they continue picking this fight.
I put down my emulation handheld that runs up to ps2 and some wii games to type this comment
They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases, which is uniquely stupid.
It’s only stupid when it’s only RETRO-RETRO games, like from the N64 backwards. Yeah I might spend some time on a retro game but they’re usually very short and they’re probably not gonna scratch the itch of a modern game, though for JRPGs that might not be the case.
But when we talk about from the ps2 onwards? Yeah sometimes I play one of the many many many 6th gen games instead of buying a recently released game at full price.
It’s obvious that they just don’t want to start the process of making old legally inaccessible game freely available, because then we could start with Retro games and then move forwards into games that DO bite into new game sales.
Either way emulation is always available, so I’m not losing sleep over this.
Video game industry as always trailblazing for all the worst reasons. But sure some pronouns, a minority and a woman in games is the problem. Got mfs paying 10s of thousands on diablo immortal, will end up getting adverts every 5 minutes in a triple A game like crusty mobile games but they’ll still whine about a minority even in non speaking roles. Gamers do this to themselves I swear
Good luck with that lol the global south is crawling with bootleggers who sell bootleg consoles packed with retro games all the time. I have a couple myself to play all the SNES, PS1, and Arcade classics.
Heck, one of my cousins bought a nice console with thousands of bootlegged games on it in fuckin Green Bay Wisconsin. There’s no winning this fight
They targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.
We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic,removed apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.
Removed by mod
