June 18, 2004

Videogame sales UP, music sales DOWN, but BOTH are pirated. While the article in question isn't exactly the be-all-end-all of the game emulation debate, it is a nice primer for those laymen who have yet to be ordained in the Church of Game Piracy. I could give you some extra cool links, but those are all of dubious legality.

My problem with the article is it fails to explain how game piracy (in my humble opinion) helps boost sales. Think of all the kids who bought Final Fantasy VII, then pirated the older unavailable games, then started buying all the Square titles they could find. This is in no way autobiographical, I swear to God. (Well, it might have touched on the subject, but I make a rule of not reading the stuff I post. This whole article could be not safe for work-- who knows?) (Just kidding on the NSFW thing.) P.P.P.P.P.S. This site's music review section is far hipper than Pitchfork's.

posted by The Sacred and Profane 20 years ago
  • Not a bad primer, I think. (Not that I have ever heard of such a thing, or played emulated... mumble, or bought games after... mumble.) Skims over some interesting questions, although I don't think the ROM/MP3 parallel is as close as one might think. Come to think of it, I wish gaming companies would pay more attention to their older properties than they do. It's a rare thing when an old game gets rereleased/ported, and generally it's done to hawk the new adventures of [franchise]. Remastered/rereleased CDs, on the other hand, are everywhere. At least it seems that way. Movies even more so - you can pick up DVDs for movies going back several decades, but it can be a pain finding games (apart from very, very huge titles) more than a couple of years old. It may be as simple as the market being too small to bother sustaining niche titles, for something analogous to catalog CD sales. So far; maybe old-school nostalgia from now-grownup gamers could grow to a point where rereleasing this stuff would be profitable.
  • Emulation is basically a *cough* old guys' hobby. We love to be able to play, right on our desktop, the very games that enthralled us back when we were young kids. I've been somewhat active on the MacMAME boards, and there's the cycle of newcomers asking for ROMs and complaining about how 'only old, crappy games are emulated' and pressure the programmers to bring out the latest fighting game... well, it's not like that. It's more than hoarding games, or even playing them. It's just capturing a memory of the past. As for the legality, and the status on profitablilty, it's very muddy. I've seen several Atari2600 standalone gizmos lately, and there's a C64 one coming out. And some of the old 8-bit ones are resurfacing as phone games. So I can see emulation slipping further into the shadows.
  • If you frequent enough RPG or general gaming sites, you'll find a fairly vibrant Super Nintendo / 16-bit generation emulation scene alive under the surface. Even the kids these days like to emulate, especially to see the roots of recent franchises.
  • Ladies and Gentlemen, I have recently become the proud new owner of an X-Arcade joystick, and, at $150, that in itself is reason to pirate the hell out of all the games I can. And what Flagpole said: Emulation is basically a *cough* old guys' hobby. We love to be able to play, right on our desktop, the very games that enthralled us back when we were young kids. In addition, there's some games I want to see the "endings" to, but never could as a kid because I sucked.
  • I ...didn't... ahem... start messing with emulators as a 21-year-old girl, with SNES roms. It's not only an old guys' hobby. Not that I'm contradicting, just bringing up an anecdote to widen the scope a little. There are also emulations of Infocom-style text games online, a marvelous thing if I ever saw one. It's probably been linked here before.
  • Definitely not just an old guys' hobby. I first got interested in SNES roms when I was around 14. The Sacred and Profane: That's how I got interested in games, only it wasn't FF7. I don't remember what.
  • Okay, okay. Emu is for young girls too.
  • A play emulated games. I never had a genesis. So, I play all the genesis games. One thing I do think about emulation is that if the games you've been playing get re-released and you have the system they've come out on, you should go buy them. Which is why this is the coolest thing ever. Also, it's the only way I have to play Metal Slug.