Does anyone actually pay $20 for ROMs?

[Cebus Capucinis]

I just showed up because I heard there were butts to suck....

 

 

Do you shove it first, THEN suck the butt? I presume that's the best way to get whatever the "it" is you shoved in there out. But if you need/want it out, why put it in there in the first place, let alone "shove" it in there, this necessitating harder sucking and less likelihood of receiving your "it" back? The logistics of this process baffles me.

 

(Yes, I'll gladly pay $20 for a ROM, but I'm a little less income sensitive than the average user, I think, so I'm probably not representative of a good sample.)

[poconojo]

With all the work that probably goes into these games, 20 dollars doesn't seem that bad.I never thought games for the atari 2600 could look and play this good.

[john_q_atari]

I'll pay $20 for the best of the best of the best, Sir!

[+Stephen]

2 hours ago, Cebus Capucinis said:

I just showed up because I heard there were butts to suck....

 

 

Do you shove it first, THEN suck the butt? I presume that's the best way to get whatever the "it" is you shoved in there out. But if you need/want it out, why put it in there in the first place, let alone "shove" it in there, this necessitating harder sucking and less likelihood of receiving your "it" back? The logistics of this process baffles me.

 

(Yes, I'll gladly pay $20 for a ROM, but I'm a little less income sensitive than the average user, I think, so I'm probably not representative of a good sample.)

Does the question now become "would you pay $20 to suck someone's butt?"  What about, "would you pay $20 to have your butt sucked?"  What about this ROM vs RAM it talk?

[Cebus Capucinis]

Just now, Stephen said:

Does the question now become "would you pay $20 to suck someone's butt?"  What about, "would you pay $20 to have your butt sucked?"  What about this ROM vs RAM it talk?

Well, you're supposed to "dump" ROMs, so those clearly come from the butt.

[+Andrew Davie]

Actually, what I'm hanging out for is some sort of scheme (for example NFT) where a certain percentage of royalties is paid to an author on ever sale of an item. Why should I sell something to a collector for (say) $50 who then tries to flip it for $500?  This is not a fair balance. We need to recognise the long-term "ownership" of artworks and fairly include authors in the money made as a result of that artworks' creation. It's totally unfair to be selling something at a profit, without including the original author as a beneficiary of that sale. IMHO.

[+x=usr(1536)]

Does all of this butt-sucking mean that we should expect Atari to release a Human Centipede game?

[+Karl G]

20 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

My next game is going on sale for 1 cent.  For the first copy.  I'll double the price every copy after that. Second person gets a copy for 2 cents. The third for 4 cents. It will be interesting to see how many copies I sell.

 

Are you accepting pre-orders, perchance?

[MrTrust]

5 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

This is not a fair balance. We need to recognise the long-term "ownership" of artworks and fairly include authors in the money made as a result of that artworks' creation. It's totally unfair to be selling something at a profit, without including the original author as a beneficiary of that sale. IMHO.

 

I don't doubt this is frustrating for someone in your position, but buyers would be insane to support something like this. 

 

If you can still claim ownership over your half of an exchange of value, in what sense can you say you sold me something?  If I buy a game at $50, and in 2 years, it's selling for $5 on eBay, do I get to come after you for a retroactive partial refund to cover the loss of value?  If you're asserting ownership over your game after the sale, why don't I get to assert ownership of my money?

 

This logic, extrapolated out even a little bit, would be catastrophic.  Let's say a contractor gets paid every time a home sells at a profit.  What's the incentive to build enough houses to meet demand?  Once you have this source of passive income indefinite, ensuring continued scarcity is going to be far more profitable than actually meeting demand.

 

If you have something like Rikki & Vikki on your hands, why wouldn't you limit the run to just a handful of copies that you mete out in drips periodically?  If you've got a stake in the eBay price, you have every incentive to help drive that price up, which you can unilaterally do from the outset by restricting supply.

 

You could probably make more money this way, but you.rum the risk of driving retro gaming further into being a boutique luxury niche for middle-aged UMC-ers.  Maybe that's destined to be anyway, but if any of this is done for the love of it, you'd think it should be made more widely accessible. 

 

ROMs seem like a sensible compromise.  There are many games I have free ROMs of that I would have paid for had the dev asked.  There's definitely money being left on the table by allowing cartridge purchasers to wholly subsidize everyone else.  I think they should subsidize everyone else, just not to the same extent.  Cartridge prices should probably come up, ROM prices should come down slightly at the higher end, and completely free ROMs should be discouraged.  Posting your first Atari game, or a Christmas variant, or something like that is one thing, but if you're an experienced dev with a quality game that people want, you should charge at least $3-$5 even for a 4k game.

 

it wouldn't totally deflate scalper prices, but it would blunt them a bit, make creators more money than the current arrangement, and discourage the mentality that all of this stuff should be free.

[+Andrew Davie]

32 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

 

I don't doubt this is frustrating for someone in your position, but buyers would be insane to support something like this. 

 

What incentive is there for homebrew programmers who might, for example, spend years developing a title and then perhaps see a few hundred dollars total in-pocket from sales of that title - and subsequently see individual copies of the game selling for $1000 or more?  I mean, why even bother releasing binaries or ROMs?  Where's the benefit for the developer here?  I might as well just write stuff for myself and never ever release games. I loathe this whole "profiting off my hard work" situation.

 

I most certainly do not write games for "investors" who look to make a profit by holding onto my work for some period and then selling at a markup. I write games for people to enjoy and play. It is extremely demotivating when I see my work, for which I may have actually "earned" a few dollars (e.g., $5/cart)... selling for orders of magnitude more than that. This is imbalance, and it's "using" other people. If you really want to support artists and encourage people to write more games, then you have to make it worth their while. You need to find a way to stop profiting off them, and start channeling funds their way. That can start with not quibbling over $10 or $20 being some sort of imposition on the community.  It can also be recognising that on-selling for profit is also in some way taking advantage of the original artists. A small percentage kickback is hardly too much to ask.

 

 

[+cjherr]

4 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Does all of this butt-sucking mean that we should expect Atari to release a Human Centipede game?

Oh my God… Just like the current game, but each segment of the centipede is someone on their hands and knees…

[MrTrust]

27 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

I most certainly do not write games for "investors" who look to make a profit by holding onto my work for some period and then selling at a markup.

 

Do you not do it because you think it's distasteful, or because you're not in on the grift?

 

27 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

I write games for people to enjoy and play.

 

If that's really the end, it means supply must increase.

 

27 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

It is extremely demotivating when I see my work, for which I may have actually "earned" a few dollars (e.g., $5/cart)... selling for orders of magnitude more than that.  This is imbalance, and it's "using" other people.

 

No, it's a market signal that the price and supply were both too low initially.  Carts are too cheap in many cases.  ROMs are almost universally not priced rationally.  They're either free when they should not be, more expensive than many are willing to pay, or simply not available at all.

 

There are conditions that create the situation you're describing that are not inevitable facts of life.

 

27 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

If you really want to support artists and encourage people to write more games, then you have to make it worth their while

 

How much money per hour of work spent on a game is worth your while?

[+Andrew Davie]

Of interest to me, on a bit of searching - I see there are already laws in Australia covering the resale rights of artworks, where 5% of the resale value is owed to the original creator of artworks. At least to my reading of the legislation at https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021C00461 -- and apparently this concept (called droit de suite) is standard practice in Europe (and of course Australia) but apparently rejected by the USA (although California did legislate similar requirements but overruled by the supreme court).

 

[+Andrew Davie]

2 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

How much money per hour of work spent on a game is worth your while?

I don't charge by the hour. I just don't want to feel taken advantage of.  But if you actually wanted to pay me to write a game for you - say something of the quality of Wen Hop or Boulder Dash... then it would cost you probably $50K give or take. It's a lot of work.

[+Andrew Davie]

Just what-if thinking out loud here.  Oz and UK have reciprocal agreements on resale royalty rights. USA does not. I could actually write games that simply would not run on USA consoles, if I wanted to.  It's easy these days to detect PAL/SECAM/NTSC machines. So should I ever want to "enforce" resale royalties, that would be one way to do it. That would be popular

 

[Crash7]

I will pay for a good game.  Kicking myself because I found out about the homebrew market only three months ago.  

 

I bought this for $65, worth every penny.  I appreciate the work these developers do.  

Edited July 12, 2023 by Crash7
Spelling

[+KaeruYojimbo]

4 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Does all of this butt-sucking mean that we should expect Atari to release a Human Centipede game?

It's just regular Centipede in a fancy shell that "interlocks" with other copies.

[Jstick]

1 hour ago, Andrew Davie said:

 

What incentive is there for homebrew programmers who might, for example, spend years developing a title and then perhaps see a few hundred dollars total in-pocket from sales of that title - and subsequently see individual copies of the game selling for $1000 or more?

Solution:  Sell 50 copies, keep 25 for yourself, then when prices hit $1000+, very slowly sell the remaining copies into the market

[+Andrew Davie]

3 minutes ago, Jstick said:

Solution:  Sell 50 copies, keep 25 for yourself, then when prices hit $1000+, very slowly sell the remaining copies into the market

 

I don't think you're quite understanding what bugs me. It's not about getting extra money. It's about other people profiting off my hard work.

[MrTrust]

43 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

But if you actually wanted to pay me to write a game for you - say something of the quality of Wen Hop or Boulder Dash... then it would cost you probably $50K give or take. It's a lot of work.

 

No, I don't.  I want to know what you consider to be worth your while.  You don't expect to actually make $50k off of any 2600 homebrew, I assume.  What, in your estimation, is enough money to make it worth your while.

 

50 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

Of interest to me, on a bit of searching - I see there are already laws in Australia covering the resale rights of artworks...

 

Apples and oranges.  A 2600 homebrew is not a one-of-a-kind item.  It is a bunch of code that you transfer copies of.  When an artist sells a piece, he also relinquishes possession of that physical piece completely.  You do not relinquish possession of the source code.  You could tank the second-hand Boulder Dash market tomorrow if you wanted to.

[+Andrew Davie]

1 minute ago, MrTrust said:

 

No, I don't.  I want to know what you consider to be worth your while.  You don't expect to actually make $50k off of any 2600 homebrew, I assume.  What, in your estimation, is enough money to make it worth your while.

 

$20/unit

 

1 minute ago, MrTrust said:

You could tank the second-hand Boulder Dash market tomorrow if you wanted to.

 

Boulder Dash - is under a formal licensing contractual agreement. I am not able to sell ANY copies of that game. I have zero ability to manipulate the market, as I don't own any copies of my own with which I could possibly do that.  But as to your point about artworks - artists regularly sell multiple copies of their work - e.g., limited edition prints; I see no difference at all.

 

[Jstick]

7 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

 

I don't think you're quite understanding what bugs me. It's not about getting extra money. It's about other people profiting off my hard work.

No, I totally get it.  I can't think of a single developer (You, Darrell, John, Thomas et al.) who I imagine to be making homebrew games primarily with money in mind. 

 

Really, I think the only sane reasons to make a 2600 game at this point are passion or curiosity.

[JetSetIlly]

58 minutes ago, Andrew Davie said:

Of interest to me, on a bit of searching - I see there are already laws in Australia covering the resale rights of artworks, where 5% of the resale value is owed to the original creator of artworks. At least to my reading of the legislation at https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021C00461 -- and apparently this concept (called droit de suite) is standard practice in Europe (and of course Australia) but apparently rejected by the USA (although California did legislate similar requirements but overruled by the supreme court).

In the UK at least, Resale Royalties do not cover the sale of video games. If you created and sold one copy of the game and declared it to be an artwork then you might have a case but otherwise, it's just the regular selling on of property to someone else.

 

In other words, once you've sold a copy of a video game (in the form of a cartridge or otherwise), you've "exhausted your rights" over that copy.

 

[nopaybob]

There's no fn way I'm buying any 10, 15, or 20 dollar rom to download.

 

Now if  someone offers that $ rom in a generic cartridge I'd be a buyer.

 

 

[Cebus Capucinis]

The equivalent in the United States is "first sale" doctrine. It works similarly. Unless you had a direct contract with every buyer stating you got a royalty for any resale (which is what's commonly done in the commercial space with resellers), which creates contractual rights, you wouldn't have any claim to anything. (Now, this is part of why software is now not a "sale" but instead a "license" to use, which I won't get into suffice it to say that's somewhat of an attempt to exercise more control over the product). 

 

You could certainly create some sort of clickwrap or other things that say you had the rights and in purchasing, such and such party is obligated to give you a percentage of any resale, but 1) enforcing it would likely be more costly than it's worth, and 2) I'm not quite sure clickwrap or anything short of an actual, signed contract would do the trick. (It may be otherwise, but I've just not looked into it). It's certainly feasible to do so, though - but monitoring eBay and other sites and being able to track usernames and cross reference etc. is going to prove likely a larger pain than it's worth, let alone highly unproductive.