cube_b3 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:33 pm
I don't consider pirates to be DC's core base in the mid 00's.
It was down to collectors only.
Are you joking?
The years these Atomiswave titles would have been most relevant the Dreamcast piracy scene was extremely active. The collector's scene didn't take off until recently. There were a hundredfold more pirates back then compared to collectors. Dreamcasts were extremely cheap, the games weren't that outdated, everyone had CD burners (unlike today), broadband was becoming common, and Sega didn't even try to take down Dreamcast pirate content anymore. It was crazy piracy and hundreds of pirate releases for Dreamcast were made in that time span.
They would have been pirated into oblivion.
cube_b3 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:33 pmI can't imagine pirates dishing serious coin in the Arcades.
Also they just needed to wait a year like any other Arcade game for a console port...
Labelling people as "pirates" or "not pirates" and judging their actions based upon those two fictional categories is an overly simplistic view.
Usually the % of pirates goes up the easier it is to pirate the title. Many people are willing to buy a title if pirating is too much of a pain in the ass. This is why companies continue to employ copy protection on PC, even though it's
always cracked. The first few weeks are crucial because the longer it takes to crack a game the better the overall sales will be.
Likewise, it doesn't correlate very much with how likely someone is to visit and spend money an arcade.
Dreamcast was not only a dead end but a money destroyer to anyone who continued to publish titles on because the extremely easy DC piracy could cannibalize multiplatform game sales, so it was wisest to not release for it.
We should be thankful we got those handfuls of arcade port shmups and stuff at the time.
It's thinking...