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.
Sadly some ROMs are only distributed through Steam, and others, at least until the next month, in reference to the ones Sega is delisting, can only be reasonably obtained there.
But indeed, Steam is not trustworthy, in this proposed case due to a publisher being able to simply disable a game's depots instead of mass revoking licenses. And while I understand the points on getting physical medias, to my understanding, digital medias could work as an ownership system, but it would require a given platform to both distribute stuff DRM-free, and to understand that the copies an user gets are his/her to keep. (but on a side note, back up everything you can, including receipts, ASAP, just in case either the dev/publisher or the store pull a fast one).
What ROMs are only through Steam?
Going by some notes I have, for example, the Japanese versions of the Castlevania games, and also the games in the Namco Museum Archives collections.
Hm. I did a search for ""Namco Museum" ROMs SEGA" and it came up right away - is that not the one in question?
I think we misinterpreted each other.
In my original comment, I mentioned two separated cases. First, a "some ROMs", referencing a more general landscape, and then the Genesis/MD collection from Sega specifically. And the "reasonably obtained" part is because some editions are very hard to come by, may be very expensive, and/or may be a nightmare to have the ROMs extracted from.
Then, with your reply, I thought you were asking about the former, when, going by my following reply, it would seem you were asking about the latter and that you thought I was talking about the latter too.
Would that be the case?
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.
Vintage gaming community.
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