Imagine an official storefront to buy and download roms

[Plazorn]

Since downloading roms from the internet is technically piracy, wouldn’t it be great if there were official storefronts? Imagine if Nintendo launched a storefront that let you get roms for a small price; this would prevent the legal issues. Preferably, roms bought would be free of any DRM, letting you play them on any emulator you so chose, and they would be linked to an account where you could redownload bought items. Even if it were a smaller brand, launching a storefront that becomes successful could set off a chain reaction, in which other brands participate by making their own as well. I guess for it to work, games would be super cheap, maybe depending on age or quality? What do you all think about this concept? Would it be plausible?

 

[Robert Newbie]

I remember I was a fan of Gamehut, which was a channel run by Traveller's Tales founder Jon Burton. he had some good videos, even if the titles were extremely clickbaity. When he announced his Antstream retro-gaming cloud service, he made it too obvious that the entire point of the channel was to low-key advertise Antstream. He lost all his good will in a single video. He privated the Antstream announcement video, and last I checked, he had abandoned the Gamehut channel completely.

Anyway I think stuff like Switch Online is the best any company really wants to put into retro games. Their real bread and butter is the shiny new stuff or, at best, cheap compilations of the old games.

 

[tech3475]

Sega kind of does this with their Mega Genny collection on Steam where you can just copy and paste the ROMs, although they should have gone further IMO e.g. MS/GG and not remove the classic Sonic games due to Origin.

I remember I was a fan of Gamehut, which was a channel run by Traveller's Tales founder Jon Burton. he had some good videos, even if the titles were extremely clickbaity. When he announced his Antstream retro-gaming cloud service, he made it too obvious that the entire point of the channel was to low-key advertise Antstream. He lost all his good will in a single video. He privated the Antstream announcement video, and last I checked, he had abandoned the Gamehut channel completely.

Anyway I think stuff like Switch Online is the best any company really wants to put into retro games. Their real bread and butter is the shiny new stuff or, at best, cheap compilations of the old games.

He also had a second channel, Coding Secrets.

Personally I didn't get that impression, if anything it was just exploiting having built up a potential audience of retro enthusiasts, but the Ant stream service being streaming only, let alone a subscription service, meant I had zero interest. Bad enough trying to play games like Blue Sphere with an analogue stick.

Judging by the last videos he posted, it looks like he's concentrating on some Funko game now.

 

[Kwyjor]

Remember Console Classix, which attempts to provide ROMs legitimately by having physical cartridges on hand?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...library-solve-classic-gamings-piracy-problem/

Imagine if Nintendo launched a storefront that let you get roms for a small price; this would prevent the legal issues. Preferably, roms bought would be free of any DRM, letting you play them on any emulator you so chose, and they would be linked to an account where you could redownload bought items.

The question is: why would anyone do that when you can already download roms free of any DRM without paying anything?

Then again, I suppose GOG is still going despite providing DRM-free downloads. But it would probably take marginally more effort to find someone illegally providing GOG's downloads.

In any case, Sega is also providing their library for free via Sega Forever. They can barely even give their games away anymore! It makes a good case for Nintendo guarding their library so closely.

When he announced his Antstream retro-gaming cloud service, he made it too obvious that the entire point of the channel was to low-key advertise Antstream. He lost all his good will in a single video. He privated the Antstream announcement video, and last I checked, he had abandoned the Gamehut channel completely.

Oh, is that what happened? He put too much effort into his videos for that to be the "entire point of the channel", I'd say. But I can certainly believe the video caused enough outrage to put him off continuing. Unfortunate.

 

[Ryab]

Since downloading roms from the internet is technically piracy, wouldn’t it be great if there were official storefronts? Imagine if Nintendo launched a storefront that let you get roms for a small price; this would prevent the legal issues. Preferably, roms bought would be free of any DRM, letting you play them on any emulator you so chose, and they would be linked to an account where you could redownload bought items. Even if it were a smaller brand, launching a storefront that becomes successful could set off a chain reaction, in which other brands participate by making their own as well. I guess for it to work, games would be super cheap, maybe depending on age or quality? What do you all think about this concept? Would it be plausible?

I mean this is what collections are for. They cannot just provide the direct roms themselves so collections are what we get.

 

[Technicmaster0]

There are many collections that directly provide the ROMs if you buy the windows version. SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis Classics, NeoGeo Pocket Color Collection 1 and 2 (you can get like half of the NGPC library as ROMs), Atari Vault (sadly not available anymore since Atari 50), releases by pixel games uk and Piko interactive (e.g. Iridion 3D and Iridion II for GBA) and even the jurassic park collection by limited run games. Of course the ROMs are not directly accessible in the console versions of the games.
Also, there are extractors for many more collections (like atari 50, teenage mutant ninja turtles cowabunga collection and many of the Castlevania/Contra/Mega Man collections)

 

[Hanafuda]

Once upon a time in Japan, Nintendo actually sold official flashcarts for the GB/GBC and for the SFC (Super Nintendo). When you wanted to add or change a game, you would just stop by the local convenience store where there was a Nintendo kiosk, deposit funds, and select the game(s) to write to your cart.

I have one of the GB/GBC carts. It has Links Awakening DX on it (J version). There are a couple photos of it in the Retro Games and Consoles Group photo page.

 

[Kwyjor]

Once upon a time in Japan, Nintendo actually sold official flashcarts for the GB/GBC and for the SFC (Super Nintendo).

They had a similar service even earlier than that for the Famicom Disk System.

 

[Robert Newbie]

He also had a second channel, Coding Secrets.

Personally I didn't get that impression, if anything it was just exploiting having built up a potential audience of retro enthusiasts, but the Ant stream service being streaming only, let alone a subscription service, meant I had zero interest. Bad enough trying to play games like Blue Sphere with an analogue stick.

Judging by the last videos he posted, it looks like he's concentrating on some Funko game now.

Oh, is that what happened? He put too much effort into his videos for that to be the "entire point of the channel", I'd say. But I can certainly believe the video caused enough outrage to put him off continuing. Unfortunate.

He definitely worked to build goodwill. Sonic 3D Blast: Director's Cut is considered a superior version of the original Genesis release. People, including myself, really appreciated the insider information on several Traveler's Tales games. However, there is a strong possibility the channel was a calculated way to bring attention to the Antstream project.

I had to go back and find his original video, and, yes, Jon Burton admits that GameHut was the original name of Antstream and the namesake of the channel. He had been developing the idea for quite some time before he found Antstream, which was being made by another company.

I recall several forums going to town over the Antstream announcement, and EscapeRouteBritish did an infamously harsh response video to it. At that time, people were admitting that he was difficult to work with, but I cannot confirm any of these claims. Things just seemed to snowball fast after the Antstream announcement. I just checked Gamehut and the last video was 10 months ago and the one before that was 2 years ago. (Same story with Coding Secrets. Thanks, tech3475 for bringing that channel to my attention!) So, it seems he really did have a fallout from the whole ordeal.

 

[ZeroT21]

Since downloading roms from the internet is technically piracy, wouldn’t it be great if there were official storefronts? Imagine if Nintendo launched a storefront that let you get roms for a small price; this would prevent the legal issues. Preferably, roms bought would be free of any DRM, letting you play them on any emulator you so chose, and they would be linked to an account where you could redownload bought items. Even if it were a smaller brand, launching a storefront that becomes successful could set off a chain reaction, in which other brands participate by making their own as well. I guess for it to work, games would be super cheap, maybe depending on age or quality? What do you all think about this concept? Would it be plausible?

No way in hell will Nintendo allow others to distribute their roms that can run in emulators, effectively undermining their business model