There's literally nothing wrong with ROM sites, imagine thinking it's a bad thing to have decades of games available for free lmao.
That said people should support official releases when they can, but it's never gonna be for everything, which is where ROMs pick up the slack, it's also justifiable to use ROMs and emulator solely so you can make the games look how you want them to look.
The only thing piracy wise that bothers me is people pirating new release PC games back in the 2000s, I'm not seeing how that didn't kill the PC AAA exclusive market, even though I know that's a controversial stance, but I remember /v/ in the late 2000s complaining about how "consoleized" PC games were becoming while laughing about how they pirate everything and gee, surprise surprise the market dried up and everyone focused more on consoles, who would have thunk?
I also think this is why we never got a Half-Life 3, Valve wasn't interested if it had to release on console at the same time as PC and they couldn't "raise the bar" again like they did with the first two games, pirates killed AAA PC gaming, no one wants to come out and just admit that, but like I said it seems laughable to me to say it's just a coincidence that the market dried up and people pirating the shit out of everything had nothing to do with it, uh huh, sure.
Cyberpunk 2077 is also a game that so obviously should have been a PC exclusive first, then ported to next gen consoles later like how it worked with Half-Life 1 and Deus Ex, instead the developers were hamstrung by having to make versions for the base PS4 and XBO instead of focusing on the cutting edge PC version but that wasn't feasible thanks to piracy (I'm not saying that was the sole reason, obviously a lot of things went wrong, but I'm just saying that was one major factor)
But in the case of ROMs these are old, often out print games that buying used isn't making the developers a cent anyway and it's worth it for preservation sake.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Everyone is all doom and gloom about the future of gaming while I'm still shifting through a decade long backlog of games I've found on the net and garage sales.
It's like I said earlier, a big part of the fun of video games was seeing things progress, classic gaming is wonderful, but if current games grind to a halt we've lost something major.
It just seems like it's happening to all media though, books, movies, TV, you name it, Woke is pure poison that ruins everything it touches, there may come a day in which new media may as well not even exist and again, while the classics are wonderful, human civilization will have lost something major if good new art stops being produced, I would even go as far as to say that's a sign that a civilization is on the verge of collapse, art is reflective of the health of a society as a whole, the fact that in today's world a banana taped to a wall is considered a piece of "art" is a sign that maybe the next step is us killing each other for something like a banana, lol.
Nah, for once dom is right, the early 2000s were the best times for videogames due to the cheap development cost
The ds was a literal shovelware machine and it ended up having some of the best games of the decade
Thank you, I don't know why my take is so controversial, just fucking look at this year's E3 and tell me with a straight face the early 2000s was not a better time for gaming, it simply was.
I keep thinking why everything has to be super high poly when the models for the PS2/Xbox era were "fine" know what I mean? It's not always about the graphics even for AAA, just look at Dark Souls.
To some degree you're right, the PS2/Xbox really were "fine", Ninja Gaiden Black for example still looks amazing on the original Xbox, the Resident Evil Outbreak games on the PS2 also still look impressive, same deal with Silent Hill 3.
But we also couldn't have gotten something like Dead Rising and it's large number of zombies at that graphical quality, in other words it wasn't just about graphics but also scale.
Rockstar's games for example from the PS2 look downright crude compared to their later games like RDR, the PS2 GTAs look crude today, Bully at times looks like an N64 game, The Warriors has crude graphics, they all looked acceptable at the time but have aged very poorly, like I said basically the biggest leap from the PS2/Xbox era to the PS3/360 wasn't so much graphics in of themselves but being able to do large scale games like a GTA but at a much higher graphical fidelity that was previously only possible in smaller scale games.
But in some ways though the PS3/360 era was also actually a step backwards from the PS2/Xbox era in terms of graphics, look at Haze and tell me that it honestly doesn't look way worse than Timesplitters 2 and 3, the HD era was simply awkward and inconsistent, a lot of growing pains for the industry.
Basically the issue with video games may be that generations actually don't go on for long enough, we seem to be in an "every other" deal with generations where we have an awkward period where games are trying to push things farther than maybe they should have and it sometimes amounts to a big waste of money that hurts the overall health of the industry.
Sega is a perfect example of this, they should have full on just skipped the Saturn and kept supporting the Genesis until they could come out with the Dreamcast, perhaps the PS1/N64 gen should have been skipped and gaming remained 2D for a while longer and then introduce 3D when it was able to be Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/GameCube quality as opposed to the painfully dated 3D of the PS1 and N64.
Then they should have stuck with PS2/Xbox for longer and skipped the first HD generation, only upgrading until the leap could go from PS2 to PS4 quality wise, now that would have really wowed people.
Of course maybe not, but it's interesting to imagine what it would be like if that had been the case.
