WARNING EXTENDED GENERAL RANT
RageMatrix wrote:Flojomojo wrote:And the fact that you can buy the NES cartridge for 5p, or download all 32K of the ROM for free, doesn't faze you in the least?
No....now that you come to mention it, not in the least. Weird, huh?
Yeah. I wish you guys (and although some parts of this might apply, don't take this too personally as it's a pretty general rant) weren't such slaves to this stuff, it makes companies like Nintendo think they can continually repackage the same stuff at exorbitant prices simply because the market will bear it and they make a profit, when the technology exists to make it so much better in so many ways. It means more mature and rational people don't have any options because corporations continue to pander to profits. As Flojomojo said, I've paid for some games so many times over that I feel completely justified in format shifting it. Public Domain, what's that?
It's almost as if it's the sheer thrill of spending money that truely entertains. Think about it, if the capability existed that you could dig out a box of dusty old NES carts and load them into the Wii, would it be nearly as exciting? Would you bother? Obviously it would be nice to be able to purchse roms in a nice VirtualConsole online storeif you didn't already own the cartridge, but the option to rip a cart would be nice too. One might argue that the time required to do so would be a downfall, but how much time can one realistically dedicate towards replaying and re-re-replaying _every_ Mario, Zelda, Metroid, RPG, plus have time to play any new games, let alone have anything like a social life, skill development, exercise, or a job! I love SMB1 but I only play a bit here and there anymore, and I love lots of other old and new games but there is only so much time.. So overall, the only thing that makes it 'new' is that it's on a 'different' console and that you paid more new money for it! A demonstration of spending power and thus personal value? Collect-o-mania? Some other reason?
Look at the iPod, and iTMS, and then compare the closed nature of the Wii (to the consumer), would one be so excited about buying a new MP3 player that can only play copies of the same song you already might own on CD if you first repurchase them online?
I guess part of this (particularly in relation to the VirtualConsole) can be explained by an unfamiliarity with emulation (and the VC is an emulator; it will be interesting to see how accurate the finer details are) and romsets. But I also guess that some of my frustration stems from similar situations with other new tech stuff. And other people outside this community do it with other things; car people having to have more car stuff, etc. No, I don't want to see people forced to live one way or another, but some discretion also seems warranted; people are starving and whatnot! I mean for all the America bashing, there is serious environmental impact from the gadgets consumed
all across the world,* shipping them, etc. And all the purchasing power spent buying yet another copy of the same tired ROM or some fancier chrome wheels could do a lot to fix serious problems in the world.
Still, I hope they eventually do a demo mode in Virtual Console, where you can download any game and play a few minutes of it before the demo times out. But that might be too customer friendly; it would be great to try out games before buying them but then there may be fewer sales.
I would think $1 per game is reasonable for NES games, think about how easily you could create a list of games you might like to try and occasionally play. 100 games here on NES, 100 SNES games, a couple dozen N64 titles,.,. it's going to start adding up fast and if the price is any more than 99 cents a title it will get be easy to desire a $500 investment in Virtual Console titles that could easily be distributed for free. It would be a great sales incentive for the Wii and great for gamers, and it would hardly cost Nintendo anything. Even if they manage to be as successful as the iTMS (which I think is probably doubtful for the forseeable future), the VC can't represent a significant cash source for Nintendo compared to new games and hardware, and they are a multi billion dollar company anyway. Apple certainly couldn't do the same thing with iTMS (free MP3s for Mac users) since they don't own the IP (and the IP would represent a significant cost to them) but given that Nintendo owns the IP and could do some built in P2P distribution method they could do it for a relatively low development cost if they really wanted to..
Blah blah blah... what a rant
* Granted perhaps not as much in the middle of Afican deserts or Siberia, but Europe, Asia, and the Americas all have an active consumer culture to some degree.
I want all this stuff on the Wii. Sure, I could buy most of that stuff for my GBM, but.....but.....I don't know. Perhaps its just because I want to play it on the TV or support the Wii's VC or whatever. Besides, I'm going to get a bit of a kick by downloading this stuff off the net straight to my Wii 
