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Senlis on 10 August 2009
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Scoobes said:
Senlis said:
theARTIST0017 said:
Scoobes said:
They are highly overpriced (especially in the UK). I can get PS1 games for cheaper than SNES games and they took a lot more work and money to produce.

And I don't get the argument people make about shipping and how old games still cost loads if you buy them. With VC games, the game you're downloading is just stream of data of an old game that's only what? 10Mb? if that? If you buy an original cart you're not just paying for a game, you're paying for a piece of history.

Thank you my good man. Some people just won't get that through their skulls :P


 

That's true.  But something to consider is that you are paying for more than ~10MB worth of data.  You are also paying for them to make the games work on the Wii and also to maintain the servers the games are downloaded from.  Also, if the game has any licensing fees, it pays for those also.

I understand that, but people having been doing this sorta stuff for free for years now with emulators and ROMs on PC. I don't know how lega it all is so the licensing is a valid point, but on the technical side, these games should be as cheap as chips. Even with the licensing however, the fact that Sony puts PS1 games for cheaper than SNES games kinda destroys that theory.

The free PC emulation is illegal.  People were basically coding the emulators and distributing the ROMS on thier own time and hardware.  Nintendo had to use hired labor to design an emulator for the Wii.  That means designing a piece of software that runs older games on hardware not designed for it.  They also had to encode the games to run on that emulator.  For each game they release on the VC they have to code the game to run on the Wii emulator.

I am not saying that I agree with the price tag on VC games.  I am just saying that it costs more than a little bit of data.  There is labor costs in emulating the system and coding the games.  There is cost is maintaining the server and obtaining licenses if they don't own the license.  There is also labor costs in fixing problems that arise with the software.