Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
Ugh, fuggin' lawyers and their discussions of ethics.
...whatever, let's do it.
My only real objection is when people are like "yeah, I have an Everdrive with every SNES game ever," like it's a badge of honor. You haven't earned anything by that or achieved anything impressive -- that sense of pride you feel is completely undeserved. Take the recently released Fire Emblem Fates SE -- the cart that has all 3 games on it that goes for like $300. If you have a like-minded friend who's into games, and you have that super rare cart, that's cool. You can delve into a discussion about how you snagged a copy before it sold out in 5 minutes, your friend can carefully take it off the shelf, terrified of accidentally damaging this showpiece item that's only going to be more valuable over time, etc. There'a story behind it. You could just download it, but then... who gives a shit? I don't. Other gamers don't. You shouldn't.
From an ethics standpoint, I'm pretty much with Peltz on this, in that I think that Nintendo, or whomever, has a right to their IP, but they should also have a responsibility to make those works available if they want to retain protection on it. Copyright isn't some sacred thing. Steps to abandon a copyright exist (though they're pretty outdated and not terribly relevant in today's world), because at some point, even the law acknowledges that protecting certain works is just silly. If someone ops to download Radical Dreamers to check it out with the fan translation, rather than shelling out $500 for a memory card from 1997 that happens to have the game saved on it (still in Japanese, mind you), I'm not terribly concerned with that. There's really no reasonable way to obtain that game -- it wasn't even sold properly in the first place.
For those games that are only available from resellers, for which the original developer gets no money (ie: basically every retro game)... I still feel like people should try to buy those things legitimately, even if the price is exorbitant. Yeah, prices on SNES games are stupid, and Saturn shmups just aren't attainable for most, but I think there's value in maintaining a healthy market for that stuff. I think a big part of the reason that people have taken note of retro gaming in the last 5 years is because there's been such a buzz about how those games sitting in your closet might be worth something. It makes people on the sidelines say, "wait a minute, these old games aren't just junk." And that's helped build out more and more of a community, as well as made some of the rarer games more readily available than they otherwise might have been.
...whatever, let's do it.
My only real objection is when people are like "yeah, I have an Everdrive with every SNES game ever," like it's a badge of honor. You haven't earned anything by that or achieved anything impressive -- that sense of pride you feel is completely undeserved. Take the recently released Fire Emblem Fates SE -- the cart that has all 3 games on it that goes for like $300. If you have a like-minded friend who's into games, and you have that super rare cart, that's cool. You can delve into a discussion about how you snagged a copy before it sold out in 5 minutes, your friend can carefully take it off the shelf, terrified of accidentally damaging this showpiece item that's only going to be more valuable over time, etc. There'a story behind it. You could just download it, but then... who gives a shit? I don't. Other gamers don't. You shouldn't.
From an ethics standpoint, I'm pretty much with Peltz on this, in that I think that Nintendo, or whomever, has a right to their IP, but they should also have a responsibility to make those works available if they want to retain protection on it. Copyright isn't some sacred thing. Steps to abandon a copyright exist (though they're pretty outdated and not terribly relevant in today's world), because at some point, even the law acknowledges that protecting certain works is just silly. If someone ops to download Radical Dreamers to check it out with the fan translation, rather than shelling out $500 for a memory card from 1997 that happens to have the game saved on it (still in Japanese, mind you), I'm not terribly concerned with that. There's really no reasonable way to obtain that game -- it wasn't even sold properly in the first place.
For those games that are only available from resellers, for which the original developer gets no money (ie: basically every retro game)... I still feel like people should try to buy those things legitimately, even if the price is exorbitant. Yeah, prices on SNES games are stupid, and Saturn shmups just aren't attainable for most, but I think there's value in maintaining a healthy market for that stuff. I think a big part of the reason that people have taken note of retro gaming in the last 5 years is because there's been such a buzz about how those games sitting in your closet might be worth something. It makes people on the sidelines say, "wait a minute, these old games aren't just junk." And that's helped build out more and more of a community, as well as made some of the rarer games more readily available than they otherwise might have been.
