People are buying them?
. . why?
Hey - if you can get physical copies of it, great.
A Steam bundle they can take from you with a click - nah. F that.
It’s a nice, cheap, easy and legal way of obtaining the ROMs to play on flash carts, emulators and FPGA systems.
I mean. An RPi and a retropie image is nice, cheap, and easy and it gives much more than a Steam bundle. Plus the legality of paying Steam for a bundled version is - tenuous, at best. Most of those companies haven’t existed for decades and it’s not like the authors are getting royalties anyway.
It’s a solid business model: People pirate roms, because they can’t buy them.
If Nintendo would sell their old ass games as roms, we wouldn’t have the problem of them suing emulators into oblivion.
Sure, I guess, but I’ve never had any problem getting these roms in particular. They’re all out there ready to go. I had to learn how to burn a retropie image but that was the extent of it. Other than that, I played them all for “free” - essentially, and the archival efforts of the community were way more appreciated than a Steam bundle would be. For me that is.
Why not? There’s still people born who’ve never played those games and come across them. And besides preserving legacy media is actually a worthwhile cause.
Oh absolutely, just that they’re all freely available for download in emulators. No need to pay Steam for them. It’s not like the authors are getting any of that money.