The new breed of collectors thread

[Estil | 1,265]

While we're on this subject, you know that 90s anti-piracy commercial that asked "You wouldn't steal a car..."?  Actually the more proper analogy as far as software piracy goes is "You wouldn't light your candle with theirs..."  No really, when you make the copy, the original has not been harmed/changed one bit.  So their "you wouldn't steal a car" analogy just doesn't work.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

4 hours ago, Estil said:

While we're on this subject, you know that 90s anti-piracy commercial that asked "You wouldn't steal a car..."?  Actually the more proper analogy as far as software piracy goes is "You wouldn't light your candle with theirs..."  No really, when you make the copy, the original has not been harmed/changed one bit.  So their "you wouldn't steal a car" analogy just doesn't work.

What's funny is no matter how good sales are and how much money a game company is making, somehow piracy is always the boogeyman they bring out to blame for why things aren't that little bit better.  In the bygone days where shareware and demos existed, piracy still happened, but not on the scale that it did later on, when companies stopped giving people some sort of actual access to their stuff (most ads and videos include footage, gameplay, etc. that never made it into the game or was manufactured specifically to sell it to people).  I think it only "exploded" once people discovered the downside of having to purchase games more or less blindly (as, again, preview footage and images haven't been reliable for quite some time) and are then unable to return or exchange it if it absolutely bit the big one.  Something these whiners either never realized or would never admit is that a pirated copy does not somehow, magically, equate directly to a lost sale and that people who pirate games (and other media), enjoy it, and can afford to purchase a copy (an important distinction that's never made/admitted) usually do so, while disliked stuff gets discarded.

[Tanooki | 4,933]

Whiners indeed.  It is safe to assume some who stole it may MAY have bought it, but to just say a download is a lost sale is the best boogeyman to use to scare others onto your side of the argument.  The reality is a lot of people who just pirate something, they were likely never going to pay for it in the first place for a bucket load of reasons.  Some could be petty like sticking it to the man/company, unable to afford it, unable to acquire in your area, being blocked from an honest test of the game (often for years demos were betas or cobbled garbage that don't properly reflect the game.)  Shareware did help, you get a full game broken into sections, you'd get the first section or two depending how big it was.  Some would be happy just doing that, but often, getting a pure feel for it, would be satisfied and pay for the rest.  They won't do that now, especially in the era of no returns, because they know they got you so whatever.  Further excuses of look up reviews or clips, which more and more has come out as fanboy highs on a game, to paid off reviews, manipulation, etc so ...not trustworthy.

I know if shareware had wisely in download days been applied to current systems from Nintendo, Sony, MS) for the last decade or so I very well would have bought more games, at retail, full price no less, because I know what I'd be getting into and comfortable with it.  Instead I'd just 'steal' a rom, not buy it at all, trade, or get it cheap second hand or clearance which isn't a win at all across the board for the maker -- their loss.

[Estil | 1,265]

Hey I got most of the actual blue chip cartridges/discs so I did my part.  And the roms/isos I use are from systems that have been retired for a decade or more.  As Jimbo would say, this isn't about actual piracy/stealing of current stuff, this is about preserving history!

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,013]

6 hours ago, Tanooki said:

The reality is a lot of people who just pirate something, they were likely never going to pay for it in the first place for a bucket load of reasons.

This is so true. 

The opposite of true too  I think for a lot of use who are over the age of 30ish we've bought these games up to a dozen times anyway. I can easily think of a handful of games I've bought 5+ times over the years.  Especially w the damn e-shop for Wii and 3DS, I feel like I bought every first party Nintendo game worth owning either during the given consoles life time. 

If Ive got the game downstairs in a tote of on the shelf and I want to load it onto my 3DS, that not downloading a car lol I don't even consider it stealing. It's basically recording a movie and having a copy upstairs and downstairs. Remember those days?

[Tanooki | 4,933]

1 hour ago, RegularGuyGamer said:

This is so true.

If Ive got the game downstairs in a tote of on the shelf and I want to load it onto my 3DS, that not downloading a car lol I don't even consider it stealing. It's basically recording a movie and having a copy upstairs and downstairs. Remember those days?

Oh yeah... I'm guilty of that, have been for probably 20 years going way back when early GBA emulators kicked off.  I used to keep and still do keep, an active list of minimally my NES collection sitting on a file within a PocketNES build on a flash kit, these days, they just work dumped onto the micoSD card using the Omega, but before the ezflash 4, bung, etc I'd create it.  Same with PCE, SMS+GG, Gameboy/Color too.  I own it, screw em, as you said, it's like my transferring my license of choice to one media to another to use that one license of.

The thing is I've had full rom sets of this or that for stretches over the years, kind of moot now with archive org and what people keep updating on there.  So I've abused it too, I'll try before I buy since shareware got iced.  I'll play a few stages, see if it sucks or not.  I can't say if I'm ahead or broke even, but there are games I thought would be crap or excellent, and ended up the opposite.  I'd end up with the unexpected and not end up with something I thought would be nice.  Go figure.

[AdamW | 713]

14 hours ago, darkchylde28 said:

In the bygone days where shareware and demos existed, piracy still happened, but not on the scale that it did later on, when companies stopped giving people some sort of actual access to their stuff

Uh, yeah, no, this is nonsense though. I was around back then and absolutely piracy was rampant. People pirated everything on every platform you could do it on. Some kids I knew didn't have a single legit game.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

1 hour ago, AdamW said:

Uh, yeah, no, this is nonsense though. I was around back then and absolutely piracy was rampant. People pirated everything on every platform you could do it on. Some kids I knew didn't have a single legit game.

...and now most people are computer literate, and the vast majority don't own many, if any, legitimate titles.  I didn't say it didn't exist, but "rampant"?  Hardly.  I was around then too, with a PC and consoles.  And console piracy was fairly rare--something that most people never heard about, those real deep into the scene had heard of but usually hadn't been exposed to, and very, very few that were either exposed or participated.  Perhaps we're talking about different timeframes?  I'm talking about from the early 80s to early-mid 90s, when the tech just wasn't ubiquitous enough for most people to even be able to pirate a game, let alone actively go out and do so.  Folks with computers could and would pass stuff around, but folks wearing the eyepatch with their 2600 and NES?  Nope.  By the mid 90s, sure, there were some copiers and backup rigs for SNES and Genesis that showed up in magazines and even made it to US shores, more and more people were getting computers (primarily due to the rise and notoriety for the internet), storage was becoming dirt cheap, and...shareware and demos were on the fast track out the door.

Where there are people who can do something, there will be some who take it to excess.  Even in the earliest days of piracy of any kind, yes, there were people who didn't bother to pick up a single legitimate thing within that realm.  But were these the loss leader boogeymen that they're made out to be?  Absolutely not.  If you had access to imports (which most did not, at least not easily enough to bother with), some console folks may have gotten access to bootleg carts earlier than the timeframe I'm referring to, but piracy on the part of those folks wouldn't have been occuring before they could get their hands on ROMs--and since there weren't really any functional emulators to even run such a thing until the mid to late 90s at the earliest (I want to say I was passed my first working GB emulator around 98 or 99, which ran, albeit slowly, on a ~100mhz 486), it just wasn't occurring with the vast majority of the user base until the technology made it simple enough that the non-techies could indulge.

[spacepup | 2,404]

22 hours ago, darkchylde28 said:

Something these whiners either never realized or would never admit is that a pirated copy does not somehow, magically, equate directly to a lost sale and that people who pirate games (and other media), enjoy it, and can afford to purchase a copy (an important distinction that's never made/admitted) usually do so, while disliked stuff gets discarded.

Obviously I can't speak to everyone, and I'm sure there are many people out there who do this.  But the vast majority of anyone I know who pirated PC games, never actually went out and bought the games they liked.  They just kept pirating games. 

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

36 minutes ago, spacepup said:

Obviously I can't speak to everyone, and I'm sure there are many people out there who do this.  But the vast majority of anyone I know who pirated PC games, never actually went out and bought the games they liked.  They just kept pirating games. 

How old were those folks, and did they actually have the money to put down to buy the games that they played constantly/consistently?  That usually has a lot to do with whether someone will make the leap to buying their favorites versus just always having a pirated copy around (unless the price is considered unreasonable and never drops/goes on sale/etc.).  This also reinforces the fact that a pirated copy does not, and never has represented a lost sale--there are some folks who are going to download something and never buy it, no matter what, so the company was never going to see their money regardless.

[CodysGameRoom | 2,008]

[spacepup | 2,404]

1 hour ago, darkchylde28 said:

How old were those folks, and did they actually have the money to put down to buy the games that they played constantly/consistently?  That usually has a lot to do with whether someone will make the leap to buying their favorites versus just always having a pirated copy around (unless the price is considered unreasonable and never drops/goes on sale/etc.).  This also reinforces the fact that a pirated copy does not, and never has represented a lost sale--there are some folks who are going to download something and never buy it, no matter what, so the company was never going to see their money regardless.

Various ages - I'm thinking people I knew in their late teens, 20s, early 30s.

Then again, several of them would pay for new consoles and games often, but pirate PC because it was just easy and "free."  So in terms of affordability, well, they obviously had enough disposable income for gaming entertainment, but because PC was just so easy to pirate, they would pirate those games.

I'm not making some grand statement on piracy (which is complicated of course), but I don't think it's fair to say that piracy affects legitimate sales ZERO either.  I'm sure there are some cases where piracy has prevented sales.  If it was harder to pirate the games, or if the consequences were more harsh, some of these people probably would have bought some of the games.  [I'm not pushing for crazy DRM or harsher punishments, just stating the observation]

[AdamW | 713]

10 hours ago, darkchylde28 said:

...and now most people are computer literate, and the vast majority don't own many, if any, legitimate titles.  I didn't say it didn't exist, but "rampant"?  Hardly.  I was around then too, with a PC and consoles.  And console piracy was fairly rare--something that most people never heard about, those real deep into the scene had heard of but usually hadn't been exposed to, and very, very few that were either exposed or participated.  Perhaps we're talking about different timeframes?  I'm talking about from the early 80s to early-mid 90s, when the tech just wasn't ubiquitous enough for most people to even be able to pirate a game, let alone actively go out and do so.  Folks with computers could and would pass stuff around, but folks wearing the eyepatch with their 2600 and NES?  Nope.  By the mid 90s, sure, there were some copiers and backup rigs for SNES and Genesis that showed up in magazines and even made it to US shores, more and more people were getting computers (primarily due to the rise and notoriety for the internet), storage was becoming dirt cheap, and...shareware and demos were on the fast track out the door.

Where there are people who can do something, there will be some who take it to excess.  Even in the earliest days of piracy of any kind, yes, there were people who didn't bother to pick up a single legitimate thing within that realm.  But were these the loss leader boogeymen that they're made out to be?  Absolutely not.  If you had access to imports (which most did not, at least not easily enough to bother with), some console folks may have gotten access to bootleg carts earlier than the timeframe I'm referring to, but piracy on the part of those folks wouldn't have been occuring before they could get their hands on ROMs--and since there weren't really any functional emulators to even run such a thing until the mid to late 90s at the earliest (I want to say I was passed my first working GB emulator around 98 or 99, which ran, albeit slowly, on a ~100mhz 486), it just wasn't occurring with the vast majority of the user base until the technology made it simple enough that the non-techies could indulge.

I'm talking about the same timeframe, but I'm mainly considering computer-ish platforms, not consoles - PC, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari...anything that used floppies or tapes got pirated to hell.

It's true console piracy was less common, but doesn't that sort of go against your point, if anything? Console piracy was less common because it was harder. Copying tapes and disks was easy, so lots of people did it a lot. If it was easy to copy carts they'd have done that too.

The situation with cartridge consoles is exactly the situation anti-piracy measures are trying to reproduce. They're aiming for exactly the situation consoles are mostly able to achieve - piracy isn't common because it's not easy. If you want to play the games you have to be a l33t h4x0r or you have to pay up. They're not expecting that everyone who would otherwise pirate the game will pay up - when they say things that imply that it's obviously just PR nonsense - but they do expect that if you make piracy hard enough, more people will pay up. That's the lesson they take from the era we're talking about.

[LeatherRebel5150 | 1,056]

 

[VegHead | 127]

That could be a legitimate question, but most replacement labels I've seen don't look nearly as good as the real thing.  

Honestly, though, the thing that surprised me was that a lot of collectors are willing to repaste peeling labels back down again (think the top of NES/SNES/GEN).  Then again, I'll put a disc game into a fresh jewel case if the old one is cracked and broken.  LOL, to each their own, I guess.

[LeatherRebel5150 | 1,056]

1 hour ago, VegHead said:

That could be a legitimate question, but most replacement labels I've seen don't look nearly as good as the real thing.  

Honestly, though, the thing that surprised me was that a lot of collectors are willing to repaste peeling labels back down again (think the top of NES/SNES/GEN).  Then again, I'll put a disc game into a fresh jewel case if the old one is cracked and broken.  LOL, to each their own, I guess.

Wait you find resticking a label back down weird?

[Tanooki | 4,933]

3 hours ago, VegHead said:

That could be a legitimate question, but most replacement labels I've seen don't look nearly as good as the real thing.  

Honestly, though, the thing that surprised me was that a lot of collectors are willing to repaste peeling labels back down again (think the top of NES/SNES/GEN).  Then again, I'll put a disc game into a fresh jewel case if the old one is cracked and broken.  LOL, to each their own, I guess.

And somehow that's a bad thing to do since when and on what planet?  If all it takes is a little slide of the elmers kiddy glue stick to make that peel go away for decades if not for good, that's bad?  I don't get it.  Is this like some OCD thing because the original glue is dried and gone?

I await a casualcart image of the little dude hissing at an old Nintendo cart of Wario Woods with the label put down due to glue stick.

[TDIRunner | 2,738]

If it's not the original glue holding down then label, then it must be some type of repro glue being used and that's not legit.  

[VegHead | 127]

You are all missing the point.  It's because fixing damage in other hobbies is considered restoration, and that devalues the collectible.  I was into collecting comics before I got into collecting games, and any sort of touch-up is a huge no-no there.  I didn't say people shouldn't glue their labels back down.  Sheesh.  

[LeatherRebel5150 | 1,056]

6 hours ago, VegHead said:

You are all missing the point.  It's because fixing damage in other hobbies is considered restoration, and that devalues the collectible.  I was into collecting comics before I got into collecting games, and any sort of touch-up is a huge no-no there.  I didn't say people shouldn't glue their labels back down.  Sheesh.  

Im asking this since I legitimately know nothing about comic collecting. If a page was dog eared or folded a little bit on the corner comic collectors wouldn’t flip that back and put something heavy on it to flatten it again or something? That seems like the closest comparison I can  make to gluing the label back down 

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

23 hours ago, spacepup said:

Then again, several of them would pay for new consoles and games often, but pirate PC because it was just easy and "free."  So in terms of affordability, well, they obviously had enough disposable income for gaming entertainment, but because PC was just so easy to pirate, they would pirate those games.

I'm not making some grand statement on piracy (which is complicated of course), but I don't think it's fair to say that piracy affects legitimate sales ZERO either.  I'm sure there are some cases where piracy has prevented sales.  If it was harder to pirate the games, or if the consequences were more harsh, some of these people probably would have bought some of the games.  [I'm not pushing for crazy DRM or harsher punishments, just stating the observation]

I would argue that those folks were voting with their limited entertainment budget, buying the things that they would enjoy the most, while picking up stuff on the side that carried a high price tag but no way to determine whether it was truly worth picking up legitimately.  And I'm not saying that piracy never affected sales at all, just that it's so incredibly blown out of proportion by the media/software companies that it's hard to buy any of their "boo hoo hoo, we're going broke because ARR" scapegoating.

There are, and have always been, absolute diehards who will pirate things and never pay for them no matter what, but those are in the extraordinary minority out of folks who obtain various media outside of the legal framework.  For virtually every pirate, there's a price point at which things just become economical enough to get them to pick things up legitimately.  That point can vary from person to person, but things like Steam and its huge annual sale (as well as places like GOG, Humble Bundle, etc., then Netflix and Amazon Prime/Music for other media) just show that the way to get most buccaneers to jump ship is to simply put the price point back to or below what the value of the content is.

21 hours ago, AdamW said:

IIt's true console piracy was less common, but doesn't that sort of go against your point, if anything? Console piracy was less common because it was harder. Copying tapes and disks was easy, so lots of people did it a lot. If it was easy to copy carts they'd have done that too.

The situation with cartridge consoles is exactly the situation anti-piracy measures are trying to reproduce. They're aiming for exactly the situation consoles are mostly able to achieve - piracy isn't common because it's not easy. If you want to play the games you have to be a l33t h4x0r or you have to pay up. They're not expecting that everyone who would otherwise pirate the game will pay up - when they say things that imply that it's obviously just PR nonsense - but they do expect that if you make piracy hard enough, more people will pay up. That's the lesson they take from the era we're talking about.

Not really?  Just because something was difficult to do didn't make it impossible or non-existent.  Sure, mini cassettes and diskettes were mostly easy to copy and thus you saw more piracy in those spaces back in those days, but it didn't mean that behind every keyboard lurked someone with a closet full of magnetic media filled to the brim will ill gotten gains.  In the era we're talking about, the vast majority of the pirates being discussed were kids (or under the legal age of adulthood, anyway), the exact folks who typically don't have the resources to go out and buy most of that stuff anyway, and are thus more likely than any demographic to don the eyepatch and hit the high seas.

As for the difficulty with consoles in modern times, I know folks who absolutely loved some platforms but due to the manufacturer's arguably draconian pricing policies, specifically went out of their way to pirate content for the platform (legitimately buying the odd game or two here and there that they truly enjoyed/loved).  In regard to the PSP specifically, I know one person who picked it up on the recommendation of a friend (who had bought theirs because it was neat but with zero intention of buying games for it), went to pick up several new-at-the-time cross platform games (available on the PS2 as well), got sticker shock when they were $20-30 each for the PS2 but $40-50 each on the PSP, then promptly cracked the system and never looked back.  Same person ended up with a HUGE, if not complete collection of UMD movies, but never paid Sony for a single game simply due to how they marked up prices on their mobile games versus matching that of the home system that was arguably better but demonstrably more powerful.  Sometimes even though something's a pain to do, folks will dedicate themselves to it simply to ideologically oppose the manufacturer for some reason.  Technically in those cases, I'd argue that any potential lost sales weren't because of any piracy happening on those folks' part, but because of whatever policy or action the company took which pushed them away.  When Napster was still new, a friend specifically went and downloaded Metallica's entire catalog then seeded it heavily for a year, even though he hated the band and their music, just because of the stance they took on the topic of digital music and piracy at the time.  At least from my friend, Metallica never lost a dime, because he was never going to buy their stuff anyway.

5 hours ago, LeatherRebel5150 said:

Im asking this since I legitimately know nothing about comic collecting. If a page was dog eared or folded a little bit on the corner comic collectors wouldn’t flip that back and put something heavy on it to flatten it again or something? That seems like the closest comparison I can  make to gluing the label back down 

Adding glue to the label would be altering things, even if it just makes sense to do so in order to fix a lifted/curled label.  The kind of thing you're talking about would be comic book folks steaming and/or ironing out pages which had been bent or warped in order to restore them to a more pristine appearance.  If done properly, that's nearly always undetectable, and the video game equivalent would be applying heat to curled labels to somehow melt or "re-goo" the glue underneath.

[T-Pac | 7,544]

17 hours ago, Tanooki said:

I await a casualcart image of the little dude hissing at an old Nintendo cart of Wario Woods with the label put down due to glue stick.

Dude - how did you know my copy of Wario's Woods has a lifting label haha!?

-CasualCart

 

[LeatherRebel5150 | 1,056]

 

[VegHead | 127]

On 8/17/2021 at 5:06 AM, LeatherRebel5150 said:

Im asking this since I legitimately know nothing about comic collecting. If a page was dog eared or folded a little bit on the corner comic collectors wouldn’t flip that back and put something heavy on it to flatten it again or something? That seems like the closest comparison I can  make to gluing the label back down 

What you're referring to is called "pressing", and there's a very split opinion in comic collecting regarding whether or not it should be considered a form of restoration.  There are services that do comic pressing with heat and really chonky machines that can turn a "very fine" book into a "near mint" book, potentially raising its value by a significant factor.  

Honestly, a more apt comparison might be replacing staples.  Staples get rusty, and that can leech into a book and damage it further, so some folks remove the staples.  I have seen people that then keep those original staples in a baggy with that particular book, but some folks just replace them outright.  I have even heard of people going so far as to acquire period accurate staples for replacement.  It gets a little crazy, but there are people who only want completely original collectibles, even if that means the collectible is in less than ideal condition.  It's not for me, but I say, to each their own.

[Tanooki | 4,933]

On 8/17/2021 at 4:23 PM, CasualCart said:

Dude - how did you know my copy of Wario's Woods has a lifting label haha!?

-CasualCart

 

They used too cheap of a glue or too little, if you find an untampered with WW at this rate, the label is popping off on the flap.  I can't recall the last time I saw a fresh one in person that didn't have it happen and that's going back 10 years or so now.