I've been really curious about this for a while, wondering why more homebrew makers don't give the option of buying just the ROM of their game.
Is it piracy concerns? That the ROM will get passed around and no carts will be sold? To me it seems like a missed opportunity, even if the ROM does get passed around some, that is more eyes on the game. And even if only a really small amount of those people come back to buy a cart after getting the ROM, seems like that would be more than the 0% of those people that would buy it with a cart only option. With the proliferation of flash carts, it just seems like kind of a waste to not make the ROM available for purchase.
I feel like the hardcore homebrew collectors will always snap up the cart releases, but that seems like such a smaller target when potentially a lot more people could be reached with a ROM being sold as well.
I did buy the Lizard ROM, because, coming from a speedrunning perspective, I really need to be able to play on flashcart, for save state practicing purposes, and that is not possible with a cart only release. So for me personally, I would most likely prefer to buy just the ROM in most cases, but I might be an outlier.
So I was just curious to hear what other people think about this subject.
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Is it piracy concerns?
Yes.
Owning a PowerPak, I would definitely be more inclined to buy homebrew games if I could get a ROM to play on it. With a flashcart, spending extra to cover the cost of manufacturing and parts seems kind of silly if you're not a collector, and I would rather just spend the $10 or so the developer would have gotten from the sale and have that go right to them.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with just distributing a ROM. Lots of PC games are distributed DRM-free without issues.
As a non-collector and someone who prefers emulating, I very much appreciate ROM releases.
I do have a small collection of homebrew carts, but I've (privately) dumped all of them, because I'd rather play the ROM. Though... there's 2 left I still haven't gotten around to reverse engineering and emulating yet.
I agree with NovaSquirrel in that in most cases I'd rather just pay directly to the developer. There are some that I really do want as cartridges, but I'd say about half of the homebrew I own already I'd rather have just bought a ROM if it was available. Because of that regret there's definitely been more than a few homebrew that I would have bought as a ROM that I passed on because they were only as a cartridge.
"Selling ROMs": Distribution of copies of a computer program in ROM image form through the Internet for a fee.
"Buyer": Someone to whom a ROM is sold.
"Mass infringement": Distribution of a work to a wide audience without permission. The media often refer to this using the loaded term "piracy".
So the problem is that developers of indie games for retro consoles are reluctant to sell ROMs for fear that buyers will commit mass infringement. Might
traitor tracing techniques help deter buyers from infringing? The first is to include the buyer's name as a gift message on the title screen or the credit screen that precedes it. Then to track down who leaked a ROM even after having blanked the name, you can build the ROM using other techniques that I've posted about over the years:
- Keeping prototypes secret
- Source code shuffling for both buffer overflow detection and traitor tracing. I applied a shuffling preprocessor to the source code of Concentration Room and demonstrated that by changing the order of variables and subroutines in each source file of the ROM, a simple NROM-128 game can theoretically be built as more distinct ROMs with identical behavior than atoms in the observable universe squared. Reassemble and relink each ROM using the serial number as a random seed, and you can track down which ROM was sent to each buyer.
- Watermarking through shuffling, NOP insertion, mirrored PPU and mapper port addresses, alternate instruction encodings (including occasional unofficial opcodes), subtle graphics changes in noisy areas, adding the buyer's personal information to random signs in the game, etc.
- FBI Anti-Piracy Warning seal in indexed color
I don't really want to go deep on the issue of piracy, but I would like to say that nobody buying your game is a much worse problem than people making copies of your game. These two things are very much related to each other, with both positive and negative feedback both ways, but solving the former is a lot more important than solving the latter.
If you're going to implement anti-piracy devices, they should be done only as much as they serve the goal of increasing sales. Deterring piracy by itself does not actually help you.
I do understand the piracy concerns, but I believe that people who won't pay for a ROM are even less likely to buy a cartridge, which is often significantly more expensive, due to the hardware, manufacturing, shipping, and so on.
I don't really buy homebrew cartridges because shipping and taxes are incredibly prohibitive in my country, but I would pay for the ROMs if the game was interesting and the price was right.
rainwarrior wrote:
I don't really want to go deep on the issue of piracy, but I would like to say that nobody buying your game is a much worse problem than people making copies of your game. These two things are very much related to each other, with both positive and negative feedback both ways, but solving the former is a lot more important than solving the latter.
If you're going to implement anti-piracy devices, they should be done only as much as they serve the goal of increasing sales. Deterring piracy by itself does not actually help you.
^^^ This, a thousand times over.
Anyone who says "I don't release my NES homebrews in ROM form because of piracy" is deluded. It is
guaranteed someone will dump the game and distribute it, it's just a matter of time. All the lack-of ROM release does is lose potential sales, and irritate players/buyers. There's a ton of very legitimate and good reasons why someone would want the ROM -- biggest being the convenience of using an emulator.
I feel the exact same way when it comes to pure software titles (e.g. PC games that have DRM and all sorts of other nonsense in them): they
will get cracked, it's just a matter of time.
If anything, in my experience, keeping it nice and simple for players/buyers makes them *happier*, and simultaneously relieves the technical complications of junk like anti-piracy schemes causing technical problems (and oh how they do!). It's a win-win as I see it. But hey, I'm just one guy.
koitsu wrote:
It is guaranteed someone will dump the game and distribute it, it's just a matter of time.
Yeah, in this case you don't even need someone with reverse engineering skills, just someone with access to your game and a Kazzo (if you didn't spend all the extra hardware development time on a custom mapper).
NovaSquirrel wrote:
if you didn't spend all the extra hardware development time on a custom mapper
Speaking of which, I can think of one reasonably decent excuse not to release a game as a ROM, or at least to be very careful when doing so. If your game uses custom or unemulated hardware, like the DT128M16VA1LT in Paprium (nobody's emulated that yet, have they?), there's not much point releasing a ROM because nobody will be able to use it.
There's a bit of a continuum here - maybe your game uses only standard hardware and works fine in most emulators, but ZSNES barfs, in which case a warning might suffice. Or maybe it uses a custom layout that Snes9X can't guess, and you need a cartridge folder. Or maybe it uses the hardware in interesting or at least unprecedented ways and only works properly in (say) higan v095 and up. Or maybe it uses something like a Super FX chip overclocked to 43 MHz and left in slow mode (so as to obtain fast memory access without taking the chip out of spec), in which case a ROM would perform worse than a real cartridge in most emulators. On another note, support for even stock special chips on the SD2SNES is still very incomplete, and no other flash cart comes close...
Most homebrew doesn't run into this sort of thing, of course.
NovaSquirrel wrote:
koitsu wrote:
It is guaranteed someone will dump the game and distribute it, it's just a matter of time.
Yeah, in this case you don't even need someone with reverse engineering skills, just someone with access to your game and a Kazzo
Say you 1. spend $35 on a Copyright.gov registration, 2. sell copies of your game (be it a cartridge or a ROM) only to billing addresses in your home country, and 3. use traitor tracing to ensure each copy is unique. Then you can find who bought the copy that was leaked, lawyer up, and go RIAA on the pirate's @$$. And because you have a registration, you can potentially be awarded thousands of dollars.
In that hypothetical scenario your game was still dumped and distributed, so which quoted point are you targetting?
Even in that hypothetical scenario, knowing the address of who bought the dumped copy doesn't necessarily tell you who dumped it. There are services that provide say... a Japanese address (if a person doesn't ship outside Japan). I buy a good, give them that address, and then the service ships the good that arrived there out of country to me.
Edit: And just to close a potential hole, yes, the billing address and not just the shipping address can be proxied too.
You could try to argue that the person in your country that shipped it out of country did so knowing the out of country person would dump it, but I think you'd have trouble in that hypothetical case.
as somebody who comes from the world where the "cracking scene" is alive and kicking and possibly even the largest "section" of our community. For the uninitiated, if somebody uploads a file of a demo/game/tool or 'thing' hell if somebody uploads code to a public github, it will be downloaded, assembled if need be, have a 'intro' slapped on it and uploaded to the BBS's and CSDB for all to gawk at, within 24hrs, usually by multiple 'groups' in an never ending points war between them.
Every C64 release has a download option, and when somebody buys a physical release they expect to be instantly emailed a digital file. I mean if that email doesn't hit in under 6hrs prepare to be bitched about on a forum.
To be fair though the C64 community now has a lot of options on how people wish to consume the content. Some people are original hardware only, some see that the SD card based solutions are 'better' or 'livable' and prefer them, some are emulation, be in on pc/mac/linux or retroarcade, or android phones or now even C64 Mini etc And they expect to be able to consume C64 content in their preferred form. This is because on the C64 we have the ability to write disk images to real disks and we have flash carts and tap emulators and ways to write taps etc. The nes is a bit more limited, real cart, flash cart, emulator. Also the cost of said things is higher on the NES.
To me not having a Digital version would invoke a strong sense for piracy on the NES right? People will be happy to live as a child again being able to "dump" the ROMs and be the the ones to release said ROM, like that did back in the day?
It guess it comes down to "what you want to achieve", if you are a purist and you want people to play it on the pure hardware and your goal is to make and release a "real" NES game. Then physical only makes sense.. if you want to make a game for people to enjoy then placing a high entry barrier on getting it makes no sense. On a high profile C64 release I would expect a physical release to be about 20% of sales ( not counting the download with physical naturally ). Some games even release for free and then due to demand go on to offer a variety of physical options and still sell 800+ copies. If your game is good people will want a physical copy and make room on a shelf to hold it. Without a solid review network, marketing, known brands its impossible for people to know if your game is worth the shelf space and the $60 + postage to get it.
Is the fear - "won't have enough to make even due to minimal orders", I can see that if you have to buy 300 of something, you want to make sure that you are going to sell all 300, and so having a cheaper options of download means people buy that and you are left holding the bag. On the C64 we solve this problem in 2 ways
- only make a physical copy when there is demand
- we have publishers whom stock disks/tapes/boxes etc which means they can share the min numbers over multiple releases.
Another point of difference my be how the market is/or at-least is perceived. The C64 market is a players market, while the NES is a collectors market?
I would love to try Sydney Hunter on the SNES, but at $50 for the box + probably some insane postage to get it to me on the far side of the world known as EcksEcksEcksEcks* I'll pass, it doesn't seem to be worth it. The $10 C64 digital version is something I plan to indulge on when Hunters Moon is complete however
The C64 only got a download once all the physical copies had sold, maybe other NES publishers do this, just they haven't sold out yet?
Basically not having a ROM release seems total madness to me..
*discworld joke
Sydney Hunter was leaked before the official release somehow.
wanax wrote:
Atlantis has my permission to realese the game...If you all have a good memory, someone has released Platman World without my permission!
People become stupid when money is involved!
I apologize for the outburst.
No mystery, it was given to them by Wanax, however they should have waited until release date, before releasing their crack.
I think there are overlapping but different demographics at play. I don't know the c64 scene well, but i expect it to be comprised to a large portion of people who cut their teeth at it or a similar computer (zx spectrum, acorn, abc80, apple II, amstrad, list goes on) using BASIC as their first interface... or just played the games at the time. Either way, they're more or less computer savvy to a large %.
NES gamers are, if i'm generalizing, a lot more comprised of people who enjoy the minimal and magic ritual of plopping a cartridge into place and play something from the couch or on the floor in front of a tv. The simplicity of the interface and its spatial and social context is part of the motivation to play games like this. Some of them are hardcore collectors, but not nearly all. Just like many like the ritual, program and pace of putting on a vinyl disc to listen to music, but only some of them actively collect.
NES emulator gamers are, really, more a subset of PC computer gamers, though there is naturally a lot of overlap, people that are both, and so on. This demographic, just like what i expect the c64 scene to be, is the same kind of demographic where there are enough many people that didn't think twice about cracking truly independent one or two-person efforts in the shareware scene of the 90s. While a NESDEV context of using an emulator may be to develop new software, the historical roots of emulation are entagled with the roots of software piracy.
Definitely defeating piracy for a software product is impossible, but developing strategies to get a bit more revenue for your effort is certainly possible. That may or may not include a ROM release. I don't think there's a clear cut answer to what's the smartest move. You ought to look at your game and ask it questions. Who wants to play this? Under what circumstances? Who am i catering to? What do i want to get out of releasing it? And so on.
Some games may benefit from a download key. Some may benefit from being spread as freeware on the get-go, for the physical edition to catch attention. Releasing the ROM as freeware after a while (like GradualGames did) might bring renewed attention to the game itself or its parent brand.
Ok, but what's a fair price for a ROM only?
The cartridges are going for $30-50 (or 60 for CIB)
But mobile apps go for $1.
That just doesn't seem like much money.
How i feel about the mobile app market: Mobile apps are either trash, or brought down by the expectancy to be trash, with a pretty small ratio of exceptions.
If the features between the cartridge and the ROM release are the same, a good place to start might be to look at your profit margin the average unit sale, what others take for comparable games, what you think your labor is worth, and what you think the market will accept. I think you could triangulate a reasonable unit price from these factors?
Also important: How big is your game?
Other question: Are you even able to turn a decent profit per unit shoehorned between what you can price tag the whole thing and the costs of package art, printing, board & shell manufacture, parts assembly and logistics?
Distributing a ROM is less overhead labour
The ROM image also has a different range of use values for the customer.
Lizard is sold kind of under the same premises as the article rahsennor linked to highlighted.
You can pay 10$ or more.
Something i've learned from being an independent grower and seller of hardy plants: Whatever price you come up with in the end, stick with the plan for some time. You don't want customers who paid n come back only to see that the price is now n - x within the same year, unless there's an obvious reason.
If you have several small games, it might make sense to bundle them at some point?
well you normaly would charge "your profit" margin, or it and a bit more. I've seen $2-$24 which all depends upon the size, type and quality of the game and/or notoriety of the Dev.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
How i feel about the mobile app market: Mobile apps are either trash, or brought down by the expectancy to be trash, with a pretty small ratio of exceptions.
This has three causes I can think of.
First, mobile apps are designed for devices with no input other than a multitouch screen and an accelerometer.[1] It's like trying to play a PC game with a mouse and no keyboard: good for 1- and 2-button games or point-and-click adventures, but not much else.
Second, when Android first came out, purchasing on Android Market (now Google Play Store) was available in a small fraction of countries. In order to reach users in other countries, developers had to make their applications available without charge and use advertisements as the primary revenue source. The emerging expectation among users drove the demand curve for Android games toward zero price. iOS wasn't affected quite as much, as Apple always made sure that iTunes Store on OS X (now macOS) and Windows was taking money in a country before releasing the iPhone there.
Third, in-app purchases (IAP) are almost too convenient. Once IAP gained wide support on iOS and Android, the market could have gone the shareware route, offering a first episode for free and further episodes (or the rest of the game) for sale. Well-known examples of this include Id Software's
Doom and Nintendo's
Super Mario Run. But instead, some developers focused on chasing "whales" with the arcade model of consumable in-app purchases. After topping out in a block puzzle game like
Candy Crush Saga, the player hits a paywall in order to skip hours' wait to start another game. In a recent
Dungeon Keeper game by EA, as your base expands, your miner imps end up taking close to a real-time day to tunnel out a single map cell unless you pay real money. This becomes unbelievably tedious for a room in a typical base, which is 25 cells (5 across, 5 down). The deliberate game design compromises to drive more purchases further make iOS and Android feel trashy. Do the operating systems' IAP flows even remind the user how much he or she has spent in an app over the past month?
[1] There's no evidence that Android devices with a built-in gamepad, such as Xperia Play, Archos GamePad, and JXD pocket Internet tablets, or clip-on gamepads such as PowerA's MOGA Pocket, represent more than a negligible fraction of the iOS and Android market. Change my mind.
I think that you should sell the ROM image file and a cartridge (although if you do not want to charge any money for the ROM image file, that is also acceptable (and sometimes preferable)). If you are worried about distribution of unauthorized copies, perhaps delay release of the ROM image file by six months (if you are using a custom mapper, you can decide when to release the specifications, but they should be made freely available before the ROM image file is released). Displaying the FBI warning during initialization should be OK (although I do not know what happens if you do not live in United States; also you I think you should not artifically make it take way too long), but you should not use altered versions; it is helpful to release the exact same data for every copy (and they are also the same as the data in the cartridge), and to publish the SHA hash or MD5 hash of the ROM data (not counting the iNES header). (If you want to, sell a limited number of gold (or whatever else it might be) "limited edition" cartridges before the ROM image file is available for sale, and afterward you can continue to sell cartridges but that are not "limited edition", perhaps).
If you have versions for touch screen devices, one possibility is to use Oeka Kids protocol for the touch screen (something I have seen suggested before).
Note also: I do not have a problem if you alter the prototype versions to be different from each other; it is only release versions that should be all the same as each other.
Here is my opinion and advice on the matter.
- Try and make a game that is just amazing. Something that would appeal to a large group of people.
- Put time and effort into hyping up your game so that when you do a kickstarter you make your goals because you established a large fan base.
- After finishing the game do a pre-order on kickerstarter or similar. If you want to make a profit, only release the game if you know you have 300 + pre-orders in sales.
- Give options for both rom only and cartridge for buyers. For rom price make it cheap like $5-$10 dollars.
- Sell merchandise related to your game on your website/kickstarter. If someone later pirates the game then you might be able to compensate for that by your merchandise sales.
- If piracy happens with your game, still sell your game, but also be willing to let it go and start on the next game.
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Put time and effort into hyping up your game so that when you do a kickstarter you make your goals because you established a large fan base.
Most of us aren't social media wizards with "fan bases".
Which is why kickstarter is probably not the right choice for most of us.
I would be more interested in a ROM distribution if there were a central location that people could go to buy them. Some kind of ROM market place.
I personally wouldn't charge for a Nes homebrew ROM because I know not a lot of people would buy it to justify charging for it, meaning I made it for some other reason than profit. At most I'd charge for a physical cartridge (because that's a lot of work/materials) but I'd still give the ROM away for free. You know, thinking about it, I'd do the ROM with a "pay what you want" price, starting from FREE. But that's me of course, I can understand someone charging whatever they want.
nesrocks wrote:
At most I'd charge for a physical cartridge (because that's a lot of work/materials) but I'd still give the ROM away for free. You know, thinking about it, I'd do the ROM with a "pay what you want" price, starting from FREE. But that's me of course, I can understand someone charging whatever they want.
That is fine. The physical cartridge should require payment; a ROM image file should also be available though, whether or not you want to charge money for it (another alternative is to initially charge money to profit from it but later on to make it available at no cost).
I, too, probably would release a ROM image file for free (and even the source code, too), but I don't really care if you do or not; I just like to have the ROM image file with the same data as the cartridge (with the header added, though) and a fixed hash code (so that you can ensure it is valid). I would charge for a physical cartridge if I am selling one, but would release the ROM image file freely at no cost.
Erockbrox wrote:
- Try and make a game that is just amazing. Something that would appeal to a large group of people.
Yes, if you want to make the game at all it should be a good one. However, what might appeal to some people, that other people might not like so much; make the game you like to make, although hopefully it will be good.
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- Give options for both rom only and cartridge for buyers. For rom price make it cheap like $5-$10 dollars.
I agree it should not be too expensive for the file download.
Quote:
- Sell merchandise related to your game on your website/kickstarter. If someone later pirates the game then you might be able to compensate for that by your merchandise sales.
Yes, that is a way to earn money too. If you like to sell merchandise, you can do so. But don't make the game require it; that is a bad idea. (Note: You can sell printed documentation together with the cartridge, however.)
Another alternative is to release the ROM image file at no cost, but you can charge money for the cartridge as well as charging money for prepackaged software for iPhone, Android, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 3DS, even Microsoft Windows; such prepackaged software may have an option menu to switch between the NES/Famicom audio and its own audio track, and to upload high scores, online help, etc.
The subject line says "Why aren't more homebrew games sold as ROM only?" I doubt there is much point to sell it as ROM only, although if you are not charging any money for it then ROM only is reasonable. If you want to sell it, then in addition to ROM file you should probably sell cartridges too (and they can include printed documentation).
You could also do a kickstarter with a stretch goal of releasing the rom for free like 6 months later after the regular release.
This way, you can sell the rom alone and you can also sell the cartridge, but people can also pledge extra for the free rom download stretch goal that will be released later on. People who bought the rom alone just get the rom 6 months before its free.
dougeff wrote:
I would be more interested in a ROM distribution if there were a central location that people could go to buy them. Some kind of ROM market place.
Several people, including myself, are using
itch.io for this purpose.
^ this, I also have some older PC titles on itch, and it's my go-to platform if I ever sell a ROM.
tokumaru wrote:
I do understand the piracy concerns, but I believe that people who won't pay for a ROM are even less likely to buy a cartridge
I'm not sure about this. I'm not a representive of the broad majority, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the "dinosaur" approach that a digital ROM file has no actual value to me. If I'm buying a product, I want an actual product. I want something I can keep around.
The thing is, there is no difference between a ROM that I bought legally, and one that was illegally pirated off the internet. They are completely identical. Sure, I get to support the developer, and obey the law, but the result is the same as if I'd taken the illegal route, which isn't satisfying to me as a consumer. If a game that I want to buy on a cartridge was only available as a paid ROM file, I most likely wouldn't even buy the game at all.
I’m team sumez on a personal level. So far i’ve bought 10 homebrew cartridges, and 0 ROM images. Having a unit beside the living room tv, it’d be a shame not to use it.
As import fees are rising and trade wars being waged, i think homebrewers really ought to seriously discuss among each other how to tackle hardware distribution outside the US more efficiently. Distros outside the US? Bundle-in cooperation? I backed full quiet on the premise that i could bundle HH85/86, splitting the fixed rate portion import fee between them.
If all that's available for purchase is a ROM, sure, piracy will probably run rampant, but my comment was mainly about pirating the ROM of a game for which cartridges are available for purchase. My reasoning was that an illegally downloaded ROM doesn't necessarily equal a lost cartridge sale, because that person probably wouldn't buy a cartridge anyway. If the game was really good though, piracy could even help it get some notoriety, which could translate into more cartridge sales.
Do we actually have someone willing to share sales numbers (not profits, or even necessarily exact numbers, just percentages of total sold units) of a game that was put up for sale as both cartridge and paid ROM at around the same time (within a couple of months at worst I'd say, like Lizard's PC port)? I'm genuinely curious to see how they compare.
I should be careful of what I write, because it might come back to bite me. But personally, if I ever get to release a large, ambitious game, I would probably do a ROM file release alongside a cartridge. I don't want to deny people access to my game just because they don't have an NES. I don't support piracy, but I'm also a strong opponent of any kind of DRM, so Steam wouldn't be considered unless people really want it. I personally believe the best way to avoid people pirating your game is by making it easier for them to buy it legally.
However, piracy isn't the only issue at place here. Some great points have already been made, and I think they bear repeating:
Oziphantom wrote:
It guess it comes down to "what you want to achieve", if you are a purist and you want people to play it on the pure hardware and your goal is to make and release a "real" NES game. Then physical only makes sense..
This. For me, making a game on the NES, is exactly that - a game that plays on the NES! Running it on a PC via an emulator is completely missing the point, and I might as well just have made a PC game, which would have been much easier.
One part is my own fascination with the hardware, but there is definitely a very strong childhood dream somewhere in there, that gets extremely excited by seeing something I created run on an actual NES console, the complete legit way.
There are other aspects to it too. I enjoy the physicality of it, and I genuinely dislike the idea of zapping through a "ROM library". I saw this quoted on Reddit the other day, and I definitely observe the same tendency, not only in my own habits, but also from people in various NES/retro gaming communities:
"That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly."
- Thomas PaineEven having to pick up a cartridge and physically insert it into your device-of-choice counts for a lot in my world.
In line with those thoughts, if I were to make a digital ROM release of a game, I'd probably pack it in with an emulator that doesn't allow people to savestate anywhere out of the box. I think it's a little sad to see how often people tend to completely miss the strength of some classic games' design simply due to mashing through them using cheat features such as this. I do think it's fun to be able to cheat in a game, but I want it to be a part of my game's own design.
dougeff wrote:
Ok, but what's a fair price for a ROM only?
The cartridges are going for $30-50 (or 60 for CIB)
But mobile apps go for $1.
That just doesn't seem like much money.
This kind of relates to the above quote in a different manner. You have your game that you poured blood and sweat into for years. Release it as a tiny digital file, and the wast majority of digital videogame hoarders on the internet will complain if it costs anything more than $10. Hell, most probably wouldn't accept anything higher than $5. We're at the point where people would even give you shitty user reviews on whatever service you are using, if they can't get the game for just a couple of bucks.
People understand the value of a physical product, but it's very hard to understand why a few kilobytes should cost anything at all. If you want to sell your ROM file, you need to be able to make people understand its worth.
Yeah, I'm in full agreement with the "do what do you want to accomplish" statement. As a creator, I mostly just want people to play my games. Which means I like having a ROM available for free/cheap, so that more people will play it. I also like selling carts because releasing your game on hardware feels AWESOME, and I know some people like to buy the carts.
As a consumer though, I very rarely would buy a cartridge. I just don't need more crap in my house, so collecting isn't interesting to me. And I very rarely actually play on my NES -- I'm much more likely to play on my phone using an emulator. So if I actually want to PLAY your game, I'll get a lot further if there's a rom. I'm happy to pay for the rom (to support the developer) but I don't feel like paying an extra $20-$30 for physical bits that aren't valuable to me. I'm not angry or feel entitled if you don't have a rom for sale, but I just likely won't buy and play your game.
As for pricing of a rom download? I think a fair price is whatever price the dev would net from a physical sale (ie the cost of the cart minus the physical production costs), BUT, who cares what "fair" is? The dev can set whatever price they want, and they will or won't get sales. If you sell me a rom for $1, I guarantee I'll buy it. If it's $10, I'll buy it if it looks good. If it's free (which is the price I often set for my ROM downloads), then there's nothing stopping me from buying your game (and if I really like it, I'll probably donate some money back to you anyway).
Sumez wrote:
Do we actually have someone willing to share sales numbers (not profits, or even necessarily exact numbers, just percentages of total sold units) of a game that was put up for sale as both cartridge and paid ROM at around the same time (within a couple of months at worst I'd say, like Lizard's PC port)? I'm genuinely curious to see how they compare.
Lizard would be a good one to ask about, because I feel that Brad really did the rom release well. I didn't feel like a 2nd class citizen buying the rom, and it wasn't locked into some proprietary emulator on steam or something. I paid him $10 (which was a very fair price), got a ROM, and could play it on my phone, raspberry pi, powerpak, whatever.
I agree with a lot of the replies here. With regards to my thread title, I didn't mean a game specifically sold as ROM and only ROM, just having a ROM only option in tandem with physical release.
I can definitely see it as a risk/reward selling the ROM, but I would think the reward, even with people passing the ROM around, would be much greater. More eyes on the game, and having a chance to play it, should potentially result in more sales from people that have no interest in a cart.
As it stands with games that are only available in physical release, they are currently getting zero of my dollars. With a ROM sale they would be getting less money, but that smaller amount of money, and more exposure, would always be more than the zero they would get from me otherwise. I am happy to buy off Itch, that's where I got Lizard and Nova the Squirrel.
Sumez wrote:
Do we actually have someone willing to share sales numbers (not profits, or even necessarily exact numbers, just percentages of total sold units) of a game that was put up for sale as both cartridge and paid ROM at around the same time (within a couple of months at worst I'd say, like Lizard's PC port)? I'm genuinely curious to see how they compare.
I typed out a much longer response to this, but after some reconsideration I'm going to make it a bit shorter:
Since release, the count of download sales vs. cartridge sales have been something like a
3:1 or 4:1 ratio. My personal expectation is that this ratio would widen even more if sales were better than they have been.
As far as what to do in
your project, that's up to you. The vast majority of games lose money, with indie having it worse than AAA, and NES homebrew likely even worse. We don't have many data points to look at here, but almost all unsuccessful games get quietly buried, so the scraps of information you do have to go on are skewed massively by the survivors. Profitable games are an outlier, and there are unique factors to every one of them. Anti-piracy measures were probably right for
Spyro 3, but it seems unlikely to me that the factors that made it worthwhile for that game would apply to any NES homebrew. I'm not going to say it won't/can't ever make sense to NES homebrew, though. Gather whatever information you can, but this is a hard decision, and obviously can't be made for you by forum strawpoll.
The idea that every homebrew will inevitably be ripped is not necessarily true. There are several homebrew in my cartridge collection that I doubt anyone could find on the internet, but in my honest opinion it has almost nothing to do with the vague anti-piracy measure of a cartridge-only release, and everything to do with obscurity. If not enough people actually know about and want to play your game, it won't even get pirated.
Even asking about Lizard, I've shared a lot about this game, but I only share what I want others to see, so take any info I give you with that grain of salt. Lizard's not even close to profitable at this point in time, but I'm still working on it. (I've unfortunately been about as slow in my marketing efforts as I was in finishing the game.
)
Just for the sake of argument, I think the two most financially successful modern NES releases are probably
Cheetahmen II, and
Super Russian Roulette.
Cheetahmen II was already
widely pirated even before it began, and of course didn't even bother with any attempt at anti-piracy.
Super Russian Roulette does actually have a uniquely complicated mapper, which would probably work as an anti-piracy device... except there's no ongoing sales of this game. It stopped with the Kickstarter. Whether or not it would have worked becomes a moot point, because even if it was dumped and emulated there's no sales for that to compete against.
In both cases, the most important factor for success was (no surprise here)
marketing. Anti-piracy doesn't seem to figure strongly in either of those cases, so... just food for thought.
Sumez wrote:
This. For me, making a game on the NES, is exactly that - a game that plays on the NES! Running it on a PC via an emulator is completely missing the point, and I might as well just have made a PC game, which would have been much easier.
Don't forget that ROM releases are also played on flashcarts. When I'm sitting down to seriously try out a new homebrew game I always do it with my PowerPak.
Nova the Squirrel for example is fully meant to be played on the console, with me checking to make sure everything looks good on a CRT, making sure it's comfortable with a real controller, and fixing problems that only occur on real hardware. It doesn't have a cart release yet, but the intent is still fully for you to download it and put it on your PowerPak or Everdrive.
rainwarrior wrote:
Just for the sake of argument, I think the two most financially successful modern NES releases are probably
Cheetahmen II, and
Super Russian Roulette.
In both cases, the most important factor for success was (no surprise here)
marketing. Anti-piracy doesn't seem to figure strongly in either of those cases, so... just food for thought.
I don't have facts to back it up, but I get the idea that the Haunted Halloween games have been pretty successful. But that reinforces your point: marketing. Those guys do the most intense marketing I've seen from any homebrew developer.
gauauu wrote:
Haunted Halloween
These both have Steam versions for download. Not quite a ROM release, but it's some kind of middle ground where there is at least a digital option.
As for whether they were financially successful, I don't have any information about that.
I could also list
Mystery World Dizzy and
Dream World Pogey. Both of these released the ROM for free, and did a decent number of sales on their kickstarters. These both have a bunch of hidden extra development cost that was borne long before the kickstarter, though.
rainwarrior wrote:
gauauu wrote:
Haunted Halloween
These both have Steam versions for download. Not quite a ROM release, but it's some kind of middle ground where there is at least a digital option.
To me, that's actually the least interesting option. I can't play it on my NES, but I also can't play it on the emulator of my choice. At that point, it's just (to me) another PC game that looks like a NES game.
gauauu wrote:
At that point, it's just (to me) another PC game that looks like a NES game.
If I'm not mistaken, that's exactly what HH85/86 on the PC are, they're not being emulated. I think.
Haunted: Halloween '85 is a native PC remake, with noticeably different physics when running down a hill. The Curse of Possum Hollow uses an emulator.
I realise there is no where near a large enough sample space for this but
I would love to know the impact on sales of digital and physical given the existence of a demo. Some C64 publishers treat the digital version as a free giveaway, to get people to buy the physical, it acts as a demo. But if one has a demo does it achieve the same thing?
It’s going to get anecdotal but i don’t think we have anything better to go by.
Games with demoes that got me buying their physical release:
-Cowlitz Gamers 2nd adventure
-The incident
-Lizard (maybe... or maybe it was just all the available insights).
I can’t remember if i ever played a battle kid demo, but it is possible.
None was part of some KS campaign when i bought them, even if the articles written on KS for lizard probably influenced my decision.
Kickstarter campaigns kind of sell by presentation. The campaign itself is ideally a demo of sorts, just not necessarily a playable one. I feel Kickstarters that fail sometimes do so because they fail to sufficiently/clearly demonstrate the project. There are of course a whole range of other factors to it, too.
There’s also some games where i played the demo and didn’t get the cartridge. I guess playable demo:s are very good for letting buyers decide beforehand if it is a game that will appeal them. Providing the demo does a good job describing what to expect. I wanted to like mad wizard but didn’t find the demo intriguing enough to make me order it, what with all the import duties. Then i keep hearing on the assembly line how great it is and am wondering what i missed.
All the compo entries that eventually end up as KS campaigns are sort of demoed that way.
Just in case you missed when it happened, but The Mad Wizard was eventually released as a free ROM, and you can get it here:
https://slydogstudios.org/
Demos are cool and useful for getting a taste of the game and seeing if it's something you will like, but still doesn't solve the problem of not being able to get the full game as a ROM if you aren't interested in a physical release, for convenience or even monetary reasons. I'd love to get more games to play and probably run, but at 40-50 bucks a pop for a cart, that just isn't going to happen for me. $5-10 is a no brainer compared.
I'm the type of person who owns a flash cart for my NES and even if I purchase a NES homebrew on a cart I still want the rom file so that I can play it on my flash cart and never have to remove my flash cart from my actual NES.
So, if I bought a physical release of an NES homebrew I would also like it if I got a download link to the rom. Of course I know that there are tools and equipment that allow you to rip your own rom from the cartridge, but seriously just give me the rom so I can use it if I need to.
I like the idea of using the rom of the game so that I can play with save states on an emulator, or create a TAS run, or use other tools that only an emulator can provide to look at the game. What if there is a bug in the game that is annoying and I want to hack the rom to fix it? I need the rom an order to do that.
The other day I using the FCEUX NES emulator and was looking at the PPU viewer on a NES game and just by looking at the PPU option in the emulator I learned how the developer pulled off some layering tricks with sprites on the NES.
Also when it comes to piracy, while some think it's bad, sometimes it can actually be good. What if some popular youtuber pirated your game and played it and got millions of views. Those views can equate into cart sales/rom sales. It's strange how it works sometimes.
I think a low entrance fee for anyone playing your game is a good idea and that reminds me of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is free so it has a low entrance fee, but every now and then they have a big donation drive where people donate to fund the site. It kind of works on the premise of, "I gave you free information so give back a little". Almost like a guilt trip.
You could even do a game like this. For the paid version of your game, it's just your game, but the free version of your game has a big splash screen at the start stating that it is a free game, but here is my paypal if you choose to make a donation if you want me to keep making games and doing this in the future.
The only problem is that Wikipedia has a user base in the millions, while NES homebrew is very niche.
But if Wikipedia hadn't have been free, then it probably wouldn't be a big as it is today.
Also I don't know if this exists, but you can create a holiday or holiday week where people celebrate homebrew games. Like for example, lets say that this holiday week is in the first week of July and during that week everyone gives deals on games, releases roms/demos for free, and its something where the whole homebrew community tries to give out a lot and there is an emphasis on supporting developers buy purchasing games and/or making donations.
Kind of just wanted to bring this up again. The Micro Mages campaign just finished and had over 1400 backers for the ROM only. So I really hope people take notice and keep doing ROM releases for future projects, as well as go back and sell the the ROM for older projects too. There are a bunch of games that were already released that I would immediately buy if the ROM was available. I want to play your game and I will give you money for it if you just make it so I can play on a flash cart.
After 1400 sales, piracy won't matter. They were superstars though, you're not going to sell 100 for an average NES KS.
Maybe the average homebrew developer could sell 100, if the price was right. They had it at €8. A lesser known developer might have to price it at 5 or 4.
calima wrote:
After 1400 sales, piracy won't matter. They were superstars though, you're not going to sell 100 for an average NES KS.
You can't just say the sales don't count because "they are superstars" though. In fact, a popular Kickstarter is a much better indication of realistic sales than a failed one. If you aren't expecting to sell well at all, how you sell your product honestly doesn't matter as much. This result shows a much more generic audience.
34% of the backers chose the digital only option, which is actually less than I expected. But it's still a sizeable amount and it proves that many people will choose supporting the developer over piracy.
Rahsennor wrote:
Right, but you can't copy your digital PS4 game copy into another console, for example.
I've ask one developer about it a while ago, and the answer was that they had a deal with RetroUSB and the contract was prohibiting it or something like that.
SkinnyV wrote:
I've ask one developer about it a while ago, and the answer was that they had a deal with RetroUSB and the contract was prohibiting it or something like that.
Wow. This is surprising to hear about these clauses, for homebrew scene. It is too small to trap developers into one distribution platform.