ROM sites shutting down only feels as big as it does because of the completely abysmal job the video game industry has done keeping its games available. There is no alternative BUT piracy for like 99% of video game history.
The pirates are the only ones keeping these games alive, both literally and metaphorically: they are the ones who saved the code, and they are the ones who keep them accessible so that people remember them.
Emulator authors should have statues erected in public spaces. They're the heroes who put in the exhaustive free labor documenting how these old games worked. As rare as re-releases are now, we wouldn't have seen half of them without people having already done this work for free.
You think GOG would exist as a business if not for DOSBox? The only reason all these old DOS games are available at all is because emulator authors had access to pirated games and figured out how to make them run.
You think literally any arcade game downloads (yes, even ours) exist without being able to reference the documentation work done by MAME Team? The amount of work that goes into that only happens because of passionate people, it's not commercially feasible to start from scratch.
I am NOT. ADVOCATING. CASUAL. PIRACY. I especially am not a fan of websites generating ad revenue by offering downloads of other people's work without permission. In fact I doubt any of these shutdowns would be happening if money was not involved.
And let's face it, piracy is the only avenue for so many of these games to ever be playable again. No one is ever going to work out the legalities of publishing, I don't know, Home Improvement for the SNES. The Tim Allen likeness fee alone exceeds any projected revenue.
But without giving people an alternative, they're going to keep downloading this stuff for free until they're given an easier alternative. I mean shit, when's the last time you downloaded an MP3?
That's kind of my point though. Give casual consumers an alternative and you eliminate a lot of the piracy corporations find a problem with. Then the real hardcore conneisurs who seek out the weird stuff mostly get left alone.
I don't download MP3s because I'm not passionate enough about music to need much more than Spotify and YouTube. But I'll be pirating Taiwanese Famicom games until I die.
Anyway. I happen to be the founder of a 501(c)3 dedicated to saving video game history. We're hoping to open a free research library in the Bay Area for people to study the history of games. Maybe donate toward that if you can spare it? gamehistory.org/donate
Oh, also, I gave a talk at GDC 2016 about this subject, which goes a lot deeper into my thoughts on the industry profiting off of the work of archivists and in how we can get to "Netflix of Games." It's on YouTube:
