I bought three copies before I hacked my ps2 due to a crappy drive laser or motor.Originally Posted by guatemala
In fact both of my ps2 and wii have cheap parts and could fail at anytime. It's a wonder I don't download more because I can't keep buying a new ps2/wii just to have it fail in a year and I can't keep buying new copies just because the disc became "imperfect"(stupid high standards). I also have an xbox 360 that could rrod and I am not going to keep buying new xboxes just because they keep bricking, (this is my first one so I haven't experienced rrod. BTW My xbox isn't modded either, but if it was, that would be great because then I would play it more. Overall I have lost much faith in optical discs (not that I had much to begin with). Like I said, my wii and ps2 have crappy drives so they frequently reject games that are almost new or relatively scratchless, but sometimes will load games that look like someone threw it across the pavement and let it slide and it will play fine.
I feel like we need to move past optical media because it's proven too unreliable, the discs are highly prone to scratches, the drives wear out over time and sometimes have a very short lifetime, optical media is starting to lag behind all other storage options except usb 1 or whatever it's called. usb 2 is faster, hard drives are faster and some flash is faster. Solid state drives look to be the future of gaming storage. Games could come on discs or memory cards and installed to the hard drive like what the homebrew does with wii and ps3 games and what 360 supports by default.
If I can find good snes games and n64 games for a reasonable price, I'll buy them because I have only had one n64 game break and that's because I was using a gameshark and it didn't have a very good way of holding the cartridge. Someone accidentally hit the n64 cart and it bent backwards breaking the pins. Besides that, my snes and n64 are in great condition though my 3rd party snes controller is broken. I still have my snes and n64 games as I don't sell my games unless I don't like them. Unfortunately, most places (flea markets, yard sales) that sell those games only have crappy sports titles and when they have them, their mostly the same games. Good games aren't found in those places often. Places have had those games at ridiculous prices. Only people willing to pay that much are people who want pristine copies to never be opened. I want to play the games, not just collect them and the devs aren't making money off of the ebay sales.
Overall, I rarely feel guilty. But then again when I have the money, I buy because it tends to be much more convenient.
One thing always bothers me though. I know a lot of people who condone a lot of things a lot worse than piracy. Some people do drugs, cheat on their wife/husband, gamble their children's life savings away, take money from other people, the list could go on. But mention emulator, iso, rom, hacking, piracy, or cheatcodes. and suddenly they go into morals mode. It's like "I steal from people so I can smoke crack, then I'll go home and beat my wife, but I'll never pirate. Pirates go to a hell worse than hell because downloading a cd is far worse than stealing it outright from the store and selling it."
It awfully backwards to call piracy worse than theft, but many do. Stupid arguments say to not download, but listen using sites like pandora or myspace. But artists still don't make money that way.
I read somewhere that a music label conducted a study and found that a majority of digital music sales were attributed to people who download the songs illegally first to try it out. If a band is small, their first supporters are usually pirates because the average consumer doesn't want anything that's not on mainstream radio. Pirates are the one supporting the industry for small devs and musicians. without pirates some bands fail in the market. And with radio stations rarely playing things outside of it's comfort zone. Indie bands struggle. Same with games. Most sales of indie games could be attributed to pirates trying them out first. Most people would just glaze over them.
Wii suffers this the most. 3rd party devs have abused their trust and because of them good 3rd party titles fail financially. I rarely buy games on a whim because if I did more often, I would be disappointed more often. The one game I bought on a whim that I liked was Nier. I didn't pirate it because I didn't have the capability then, but if I did, I would have bought it after pirating because Cavia really put some effort into that game. I bought FF13 around the same time, but the production values took away that game's soul. The graphics looked so good, but the standard was so high that the devs refused to put towns because they couldn't make them HD. It's sad.
