Why can't you purchase roms for new games??

[WishItWas1984]

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

I don't think there's any question that having digital sales would means more total sales.  What I'm saying is that not having digital sales helps sell more cartridges.

That's the rub. How many more carts will be sold by those that just can't help themselves vs. lost money from people like me who won't buy anything but a digital version? 

 

In reality, none of that matters at all. If sold correctly, nothing is lost by the developer. You can build the same profit margin into each medium.

 

Edited March 14, 2021 by WishItWas1984
Clarifying my point

[john_q_atari]

If an atari-compatible console developer wants to support digital downloads then it will happen, if they don't it won't. Business economics don't really matter because as far as I can reason, there is no way a developer can meaningfully support himself economically in today's world by developing games for atari-compatible consoles. You can argue untapped potential, but that's for the developer to decide if they want to try and prove that for themselves with their products.

 

I feel retro gaming will forever have a tie to the physical world, whether that's a physical console or a physical cart as well. There are many reasons I believe this to be the case, but enumerating them would make this post longer than it already is. ?

[WishItWas1984]

58 minutes ago, neotokeo2001 said:

People don't actually buy BIN/ROMS when they are made available. If there was interest in it then it would be done. Maybe AtariAge will have better luck with it if they decide to do it. When you keep saying the same thing over and over it doesn't make it true. I am sure there would be some sales of a title like Circus Convoy because of the uniqueness of what it is. This has been brought up every few years and still nothing.

That's factually incorrect as places outside of AtariAge sell digital ROMs on a regular basis. Also, AtariAge is working on a digital solution it seems. Regardless, just because someone doesn't offer something doesn't mean they are making the correct business decision.

[WishItWas1984]

6 minutes ago, Ryan Witmer said:

My three (soon to be four) 5200 games all have publicly available ROMs, and are also fully open-sourced under GPL3.  I find the idea of charging for a 32KB ROM file utterly absurd and would never engage in it.

 

Maybe it's because the 5200 is a much smaller niche, but I get people pledging cartridge purchases of my games pretty much right after I announce them.  They don't have to do that, but they do.  People who buy the cartridges are, in my opinion, not actually interested in the game.  They want the physical objects.  They want to experience that feeling of getting a new Atari game, ROM files don't give you that.  People who want to use ROM files and people who want cartridges are not necessarily the same market.

 

I also want people to be able to try my games before committing to what is actually a fairly major purchase.  Download the ROM, try it out, if you don't like it I don't want your money.  It's not like the old days when you could see the cool new game at your friend's house before you bought it for yourself.  Sure, we have YouTube and stuff like that, but that's no substitute for getting to try before you buy.

 

Wait, let me understand you right...you put all of this time and effort into something and think it's absurd to sell that work for a profit? 

[Jstick]

4 minutes ago, WishItWas1984 said:

the correct business decision.

1 minute ago, WishItWas1984 said:

sell that work for a profit

 

This might be where there is a bit of disconnect. 

 

People still into early Atari systems are a niche much, much smaller than say the amount of people who are playing SNES, Genesis or even NES games on their Raspberry Pi's or whatever.  There is still a small but viable market for roms for these later systems.

The 2600/5200/7800 on the other hand, these are pretty much all going to be approached by developers solely as a labor of love.  Maybe the majority of them are simply attached to the idea of having their games physically available for the original physical consoles.  Maybe the thought of someone playing their games on a PC with discord alerts popping up is not how they envision their creation being experienced?  Total profit or number of sales is most likely not a major driving factor.  (Audacity might change things a bit in this space, it will be interesting to see).

 

Anyway, John has mentioned that at least Champ games will have digital versions available here on AA shortly, so it is starting to happen.

[youxia]

37 minutes ago, WishItWas1984 said:

GOG is an accurate comparison to homebrew retro gaming in terms of this topic. It offers DRM-free retro games for sale digitally.

It's not a good comparison for the reasons I have stated in my post. You can't throw everything under one "retro" umbrella, when retro encompasses 50+ year span and multum of different niches. The crowd which buys the likes of Baldur's Gate might have completely different priorites from 2600 cart collectors.

 

Like I said earlier, I also think that generally selling digital ROMs is a good idea, but when people who have actually been selling in this market for years tell me it might be different for Atari, I'm willing to take it on board.

[+KaeruYojimbo]

It might be a good idea for bigger releases, but for many homebrews, the number of people actually willing to pay for a ROM is too small and the fair asking price for a 4K Atari ROM too low for it to be worth it, especially since money isn't the motivation for most 2600 homebrewers. If I go through the trouble of setting up digital distribution and only get a handful of sales, next time around I'll decide the extra 10 bucks isn't worth the time and skip it and keep giving the ROM out for free.

[+Ryan Witmer]

44 minutes ago, WishItWas1984 said:

 

Wait, let me understand you right...you put all of this time and effort into something and think it's absurd to sell that work for a profit? 

That's a very hasty generalization.

 

I think it's absurd to charge money for a tiny binary blob for a long obsolete computer system.

 

Cartridges are a physical product, those should cost money.  If you want money without a physical product get people to pay you to make the ROM.  Set up a Kickstarter or some other type of patronage system.  Maybe set up one of the "pay what you want" deals.

[WishItWas1984]

2 hours ago, Jstick said:

 

This might be where there is a bit of disconnect. 

 

People still into early Atari systems are a niche much, much smaller than say the amount of people who are playing SNES, Genesis or even NES games on their Raspberry Pi's or whatever.  There is still a small but viable market for roms for these later systems.

The 2600/5200/7800 on the other hand, these are pretty much all going to be approached by developers solely as a labor of love.  Maybe the majority of them are simply attached to the idea of having their games physically available for the original physical consoles.  Maybe the thought of someone playing their games on a PC with discord alerts popping up is not how they envision their creation being experienced?  Total profit or number of sales is most likely not a major driving factor.  (Audacity might change things a bit in this space, it will be interesting to see).

 

Anyway, John has mentioned that at least Champ games will have digital versions available here on AA shortly, so it is starting to happen.

 

I don't think the size of the market for any system has a bearing on anything, but ok. A sale is a sale and money is money.

 

However, I definitely can't speak to someone's peculiar motivations preventing a digital release of a game. That's of course every dev's prerogative, no matter how dumb I might find them. Because to create a game, or any piece of art, and force people to not enjoy it in a viable medium simply because they aren't a fan of it, is sad.

[WishItWas1984]

2 hours ago, youxia said:

It's not a good comparison for the reasons I have stated in my post. You can't throw everything under one "retro" umbrella, when retro encompasses 50+ year span and multum of different niches. The crowd which buys the likes of Baldur's Gate might have completely different priorites from 2600 cart collectors.

 

Like I said earlier, I also think that generally selling digital ROMs is a good idea, but when people who have actually been selling in this market for years tell me it might be different for Atari, I'm willing to take it on board.

The concept in question is the buying and selling of video games in a digital-only medium. The type of game (retro/modern) or system in question (Atari/PC/etc.) is entirely irrelevant. I buy Baldur's Gate and would like to buy an Atari ROM. Someone might not be interested in Atari, who cares and how does that matter in general either way?

 

Your point to bring up sellers of digital games is also irrelevant without context. Context I can't even take a guess at business-wise since again, it's a digital product. So regardless of it being Atari or for anything else, there's nothing concrete that should prevent a seller from selling digitally, outside of personal bias and/or general interest in wanting to bother.

[WishItWas1984]

1 hour ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

It might be a good idea for bigger releases, but for many homebrews, the number of people actually willing to pay for a ROM is too small and the fair asking price for a 4K Atari ROM too low for it to be worth it, especially since money isn't the motivation for most 2600 homebrewers. If I go through the trouble of setting up digital distribution and only get a handful of sales, next time around I'll decide the extra 10 bucks isn't worth the time and skip it and keep giving the ROM out for free.

If the market for a game is not sufficient to bring in the kind of sales that make the process worth the effort, that could be for a myriad of reasons. 

Sure, it could be because the market for digital Atari 2600 homebrew is too small. However, it's not even been tried to any significant extent, so I don't think there's data to support that notion as of yet.

 

It could also be because the seller is charging far too little. This is the easiest fix, as it's common sense. If you want a profit of "X", then that's what you feel you deserve for the content. That's what you should charge. Hypothetically speaking, let's pretend a $50 cart here is $30 in material and a cut to AtariAge, where $20 goes to the Dev. If that makes the Dev happy, then a $20 digital release that could honestly require about as much effort as Paypal and email is obviously possible.

 

Poor digital sales can also be because of poor marketing. If some dev doesn't make it obvious enough that it's available and where to get it digitally, yet it's well-known to be for sale as a cart on a popular site like AtariAge, then who's at fault there for digital sales being horrible?

 

Now, it could also be because no one wants the game enough. Can't help that reason for poor digital sales.

[WishItWas1984]

2 hours ago, Ryan Witmer said:

That's a very hasty generalization.

 

I think it's absurd to charge money for a tiny binary blob for a long obsolete computer system.

 

Cartridges are a physical product, those should cost money.  If you want money without a physical product get people to pay you to make the ROM.  Set up a Kickstarter or some other type of patronage system.  Maybe set up one of the "pay what you want" deals.

I'm not sure you're using "generalization" correctly, but anyway, what I posted was a question of clarification based on literally the words you posted.

 

Based on what you said in this reply though confirms your opinion, which is IMHO bananas. LOL

 

If someone spent time to create a game, how many kilobytes or megabytes does the "blob" have to be before it's worthy of being paid for without a physical shell around it? LOL

Edited March 14, 2021 by WishItWas1984

[Jstick]

16 minutes ago, WishItWas1984 said:

 

I don't think the size of the market for any system has a bearing on anything, but ok.

It does in the sense that the larger a potential market for something, the more chance you will find people in there whose primary motivation is money.  Freemium games and the trend towards IAP are the most egregious example of this in the modern market.  Therefore, these types will try and monetize everything to the max; physical, digital, media tie-ins, merchandising, whatever they can market.

 

As you get down to the tiny niche markets where people are making things out of pure passion and money is at the bottom of the list, you will find almost 100% of developers making stuff for their own (potentially weird) personal reasons. 

 

As an example, I have been working on my first 2600 title in my spare time for fun.  If it ever does get a release, I'm only concerned with putting on physical carts, because to me that is special.  It's not that I'm against digital, or trying to prevent people from playing the game; rather that my vision is to create a game as it would have been back in the day, something special for those with original hardware to enjoy.  

 

29 minutes ago, WishItWas1984 said:

to create a game, or any piece of art, and force people to not enjoy it in a viable medium simply because they aren't a fan of it, is sad.

When Nintendo puts out a game exclusively on the Switch, are they "forcing" people to not enjoy it on the viable medium of PS5 and Xbox?  There are millions of examples of things being created for specific platforms, I mean in gaming alone it's been there since the start.  If you aren't interested in investing in a particular platform, it's hard to justify complaining about it.

[hizzy]

It's going to sound weird, but I like having roms because I like collecting NIB homebrews. If it comes in a box and there is no rom, I'll buy one to play and one to keep sealed

[+KaeruYojimbo]

4 hours ago, WishItWas1984 said:

If the market for a game is not sufficient to bring in the kind of sales that make the process worth the effort, that could be for a myriad of reasons. 

Sure, it could be because the market for digital Atari 2600 homebrew is too small. However, it's not even been tried to any significant extent, so I don't think there's data to support that notion as of yet.

 

It could also be because the seller is charging far too little. This is the easiest fix, as it's common sense. If you want a profit of "X", then that's what you feel you deserve for the content. That's what you should charge. Hypothetically speaking, let's pretend a $50 cart here is $30 in material and a cut to AtariAge, where $20 goes to the Dev. If that makes the Dev happy, then a $20 digital release that could honestly require about as much effort as Paypal and email is obviously possible.

 

Poor digital sales can also be because of poor marketing. If some dev doesn't make it obvious enough that it's available and where to get it digitally, yet it's well-known to be for sale as a cart on a popular site like AtariAge, then who's at fault there for digital sales being horrible?

 

Now, it could also be because no one wants the game enough. Can't help that reason for poor digital sales.

While you are correct when you say the digital market for 2600 homebrews hasn't been tried to a significant extent, I think you're greatly overestimating what the average person is willing to pay for a ROM, especially when a cart and manual (without a box, which is the option the people who just want to play often go with, if they buy anything at all) typically costs 25-30 dollars. Asking $20 for a ROM is going alienate a lot of your potential audience.  A more reasonable price would be closer to 5 dollars. Maybe 10 for an upper-upper echelon game. Considering that most of the 2600 homebrew market is collectors who want an actual cartridge, for a lot games that's not a lot of money left on the table. Not enough that most homebrewers, who aren't in the hobby specifically to make money, are going to worry about.

 

I think high profile games like Galagon would do well in digital sales, and I think having an easy to find hub for all digital sales would help all games some, but I don't think you'd see massive sales overall.

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

[WishItWas1984]

4 hours ago, Jstick said:

It does in the sense that the larger a potential market for something, the more chance you will find people in there whose primary motivation is money.  Freemium games and the trend towards IAP are the most egregious example of this in the modern market.  Therefore, these types will try and monetize everything to the max; physical, digital, media tie-ins, merchandising, whatever they can market.

 

As you get down to the tiny niche markets where people are making things out of pure passion and money is at the bottom of the list, you will find almost 100% of developers making stuff for their own (potentially weird) personal reasons. 

 

As an example, I have been working on my first 2600 title in my spare time for fun.  If it ever does get a release, I'm only concerned with putting on physical carts, because to me that is special.  It's not that I'm against digital, or trying to prevent people from playing the game; rather that my vision is to create a game as it would have been back in the day, something special for those with original hardware to enjoy.  

 

When Nintendo puts out a game exclusively on the Switch, are they "forcing" people to not enjoy it on the viable medium of PS5 and Xbox?  There are millions of examples of things being created for specific platforms, I mean in gaming alone it's been there since the start.  If you aren't interested in investing in a particular platform, it's hard to justify complaining about it.

 

My point was that the size and type of a potential market or the system in question has no bearing on the core idea of selling a ROM. It's either economically feasible and easy, or not. And in this case (2600), it's rather easy. This speaks to your Nintendo vs. Sony/Microsoft comment. For Nintendo, restricting mediums is wrapped around so many other issues and implications, from cost to corporation success, that not a good comparison.

 

Now, there are many reasons not to release a 2600 ROM, and I'm only arguing in this thread against those that are factually incorrect or are very likely to be so, based on history, economics, etc...

 

If someone doesn't do it simply because they emotionally do not want to, with revenue and all that be damned, then so be it. There's nothing generally wrong with that.

[WishItWas1984]

4 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

While you are correct when you say the digital market for 2600 homebrews hasn't been tried to a significant extent, I think you're greatly overestimating what the average person is willing to pay for a ROM, especially when a cart and manual (without a box, which is the option the people who just want to play often go with, if they buy anything at all) typically costs 25-30 dollars. Asking $20 for a ROM is going alienate a lot of your potential audience.  A more reasonable price would be closer to 5 dollars. Maybe 10 for an upper-upper echelon game. Considering that most of the 2600 homebrew market is collectors who want an actual cartridge, for a lot games that's not a lot of money left on the table. Not enough that most homebrewers, who aren't in the hobby specifically to make money, are going to worry about.

 

I think high profile games like Galagon would do well in digital sales, and I think having an easy to find hub for all digital sales would help all games some, but I don't think you'd see massive sales overall.

"Hypothetically speaking, let's pretend..." That part of my comment is something I think you missed. lol

 

I wasn't giving literal values. It was an example to prove a point that was brought up at somewhere in this thread regarding the notion that they don't sell well enough to bother. There was no context, so I was speculating that perhaps they mean it doesn't make enough money, which could be because it's not priced correctly.

 

I agree that you wouldn't see "massive sales" either, whatever number constitutes "massive". That's beside the point though.

[MrTrust]

I don't really understand this.  I have ROMs for a lot of homebrews for all kinds of different Atari platforms.  There's not all that much that I haven't been able to find available legitimately (or at least it appears that way).  Seems like a lot of guys have made these available for free already.

 

I paid for Sheep it Up because it was the only one I saw anyone even making that an option for.  I'd gladly give all these guys some dough for what they already seem to be giving away for free anyway if they asked.  Seems kind of silly not to.

 

I've bought some individual homebrew carts.  I'll probably buy more, but it is kind of a pain in the ass to collect these things.  So many of them are small runs that you miss out on, it's not clear where to find a lot of them, and it's a headache to go through the preorder/payment and wait for the thing to get made or shipped or whatever.  I understand the AA store solves a lot of these issues, but it's a pain in general. 

 

For instance, I wanted to get a copy of that new Audacity game, but I go to the site, and it's not working, oh and you need a Paypal account,which I don't deal with anymore due to their nightmare customer service and several times them refusing to stop unauthorized charges to my card.  Really?  In 2021, you don't have even one alternative payment processor?  AND I have to sign up for an account on your website to boot?  This is an awful lot of hoop jumping for a product you ostensibly actually want me to buy.

 

If they just put the game out there as a download, it seems like a lot of these issues go away.  I don't understand how it can sumtaneously be true that doing it will kill your cartridge sales, and also nobody will buy the digital version.  It can't be piracy.  I've looked through a lot of rom sites and collections.  If the stuff that has not been made available legitimately is out there in pirated form, they're hiding it awfully well.  

[Keatah]

30 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

For instance, I wanted to get a copy of that new Audacity game, but I go to the site, and it's not working, oh and you need a Paypal account,which I don't deal with anymore due to their nightmare customer service and several times them refusing to stop unauthorized charges to my card.  Really?  In 2021, you don't have even one alternative payment processor?  AND I have to sign up for an account on your website to boot?  This is an awful lot of hoop jumping for a product you ostensibly actually want me to buy.

It is, a lot of hoop jumping.. Too much for any of these renaissance games. So much other material readily available.

[+Andrew Davie]

3 hours ago, MrTrust said:

If the stuff that has not been made available legitimately is out there in pirated form, they're hiding it awfully well.  

 

So you're basically saying you've searched and searched but can't find those pirated ROMs you're looking for  

All joking aside, there is some honour in this community.
 

 

If a developer doesn't want to release a binary, for whatever reasons... so be it.

[juansolo]

Buying HB carts is a waiting game, but AA is your friend if you have the patience. I've managed so far to pick up almost everything I've been after one way or another due to this forum and I haven't been rogered by a scalper once. I have a list of what I want and I am subscribed to the threads about them. Sometimes you're just lucky and the dude will let you buy a PCB with some sticky labels and the manual for you to put it into your own cart shell and solder on your own POKEY (DK PK). Sometimes that one you missed gets a re-release (Impact X). Others I'm still waiting for that 2nd run (Boulderdash). Indeed the game I'm having most trouble getting these days is an commercial Jaguar game that's just getting marked up so stupidly by scalpers these days that it's not worth it anymore.

 

The other thing is to subscribe to the dev threads of anything you're interested in. There's always the information in there about how to get them when they're released. Then just don't dally when they are. It astounds me that you have situations like Rikki and Vikki where the dev was sat on a pile of carts forever until they eventually sold out, then the demand kicks in... Sometimes I think a lot of it is the rarity rather than the games themself that drives collectors.

 

As for ROMs, I'm there for that. A lot of the games I buy I'll admit I'm doing so to support AA and the devs more than anything else as I have a multitude of flash carts. But when it comes to importing, that's only just getting worse for some countries and the costs are getting out of control now in that regard. That said, I like having the carts... So I'll likely keep buying them, but having ROMs available also would be really nice alternative for us now.

Edited March 15, 2021 by juansolo

[MrTrust]

5 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

 

So you're basically saying you've searched and searched but can't find those pirated ROMs you're looking for  

All joking aside, there is some honour in this community.
 

 

If a developer doesn't want to release a binary, for whatever reasons... so be it.

Well, how are you supposed to know if it's been released if you don't search for it?  I've been meaning to get Tempest for 5200, for example, but the prototype ROM that's out there, the controls are not so good.  I understand the version available on cart is completed, but it'd be nice to see ahead of time if that issue's been fixed, so I looked through all the various ROM sets (granted, all that legacy stuff is technically pirated I guess) that are floating around, and none of them have the real thing.  Searching for it, I see threads that other people are looking for it, and they've come up with nothing, and I don't see anyone tipping them off to a link or a torrent or anything like that.  Surely, you'd think if any game for that system was going to leak, it would be one like that.  Or, you see some Polish 8-Bit homebrew talked about, and you go looking for the ROM and find that the usual places don't have it, and if it's not there, realistically, where would you even begin to look?  So, I conclude that it's not out there.

Or, you go looking for Zippy the Porcupine to see if there's a demo or anything, and you find that the final binary's been released by the author.  Cool; if he's giving it away, I'm not gonna' turn it down.  I may yet dish out for the cartridge since it's a neat conversation piece, and as it turns out a pretty good game outside of the novelty, but I would have paid up front for the ROM if somebody'd made the ask.  It'd be nice to have an option between freeloading and going through the full headache of getting the real thing, if that's even possible half of the time (anyone wanna' sell me a copy of Rikki & Vikki?  Didn't think so).

Yes, there's the option of don't release the binary, don't download the binary.  That's the author's prerogative, but did you make that game so people would play it, or to have a few thousand people buy a cartridge, a bunch of which are going to get scalped on eBay and a bunch that are going to sit on collectors' shelves in the box?  And what's stopping a determined pirate from leaking the ROMs anyway?  Having to buy a physical copy never stopped anyone in the past.

Edited March 15, 2021 by MrTrust

[zzip]

18 hours ago, youxia said:

Gog is a totally different market (PCs were uber popular and are a rather "young" retro), 8-bit micros are a bit more similar, and that's what I mentioned in my earlier post. Going with my "common sense" feel and examples from other platforms I generally agree that digital sales could possibly be a significant revenue stream (especially if you release the digital ROM months after the cart). But maybe consoles really are a different kettle of fish (eg I don't think there are any digital sales for the likes of Megadrive). I think devs in this thread mentioned not making much from digital, so I don't really know. It'll be interesting to see how it goes if Albert enables this for AtariAge shop.

GoG is taking old PC games, removing any copy protection/DRM/dependancy on physical media and repackaging them to run on modern systems, and selling it for a low price (these games are well beyond their product lifespan)

 

I would love to see that model applied to other retro systems, Amiga, ST, C64, consoles, etc  right now you can only buy old games for those systems in collections if at all, and those collections tend to focus on the same set of games and ignore many other.

 

Homebrew is different because it's new development.   The developers are looking for more than GoG prices.  I guess the question is how much are customers willing to pay for digital homebrews?

17 hours ago, neotokeo2001 said:

https://theloon.itch.io/upp

https://robsomestudios.itch.io/baby

https://denebola-interactive.itch.io/kelly-kangaroo

Many more on that site.

 

Visibility is a problem there.   If you go to itch.io, they don't promote retro systems.   You might stumble upon them if enter the right search terms.  Usually what happens is you find a link to the page if you read the right forum or blog post.    If you come to AtariAge, it's fairly obvious they have a store selling homebrew carts.   It's splashed all over the site.   It's much less obvious that there a 2600 roms for sale anywhere, until we find a post like yours.

[Serguei2]

I think selling roms would get more audience than physical games.

 

Not everybody have classic consoles and prefer playing on computers or other devices instead.