I’m hoping with the easing up of emulators and game streaming that Nintendo and Sega would just put official emulators up. Honestly, I’d pay them for access to one and to related games.
I know this is mostly wishful thinking but, a woman can dream.
Like, I get it Nintendo, you want money. That's understandable.
Then let me buy the damn games. I'd love to be able to buy roms to run in an official emulator, or ideally any emulator.
Honestly at this point why even bother with DRM. The roms for classic systems are absurdly easy to get. Hell even switch roms. But Nintendo insists the only way to play retro games legitimately is to buy either a monthly subscription, or a copy of the rom bundled with the official emulator that can only be run on that specific generation console, or buy dedicated system for it.
And even then its only the games they put out on the system/marketplace/subscription service. A tiny fraction of the library.
Now that emulation is allowed on iOS, I would think this is the worst time for either of them to start selling ROMs for iPhones. If Nintendo launched a Virtual Console app years ago? Easy money, no question. Captive audience in a closed ecosystem. Now? If I open the app store and see an app that can play Pokemon Red/Blue for free right next to an app from Nintendo that charges me $5 - $10 for the same experience, why would I pay?
Regardless, Nintendo wouldn't even try to sell you ROMs these days anyway. They'll sell you a subscription service like they do on Switch. No thanks. I'm good with the emulation we have now.
To be clear: apple removed an emulator that was a blatant rip off of an open source emulator but full of ads and tracking. The original emulator is still up.
No, and it will never be because Riley Testut seem to be as greedy as Apple.
Look he was right, but he’s kind of bitching, he can just release GBA4iOS on the App Store and people will use it instead of that crap filled with ads. What if he just had summited GBA4iOS to the App Store before this developer? Oh I know why, because he’s trying to get his AltStore approved and wanted to have GBA4iOS exclusively there to drive people into it.
Yes, and why isn't he publishing Delta to the App Store then? He's clearly leveraging Delta to popularize his AltStore. I'm using "greedy" in a sense that he wants to gain something (that may or may not be monetary) by leaving Delta to be an AltStore exclusive.
Also that’s besides the point. I’m trying to learn if the developer said they’d publish on the App Store, not the AltStore.
From what I see his fediverse accounts it doesn't seem like it... there are multiple people asking him to publish on the App Store and he seems to be conveniently ignoring all of them.
I mean it's not beside the point if the reason for not publishing on the App Store was money.
I had no idea about Altstore going in, but looking into it it's all done over Patreon, and I can't find reference to any fees you mention. The most expensive Patreon tier for them is $8.50 per month, or $102 per year, however $3 (at an early bird rate) or $36 per year is enough to allow you to use 3rd party hosts for your app.
Also worth noting, distribution on third party App Store does not exempt developers from the developer program fee — Developers must sign a separate agreement to opt into the new business terms.
So, not only they are still responsible for the $99/yr fee, they’d need to sign a new agreement to opt into the new business terms, which has a separate additional fee schedule attached.
I’ve seen that. Thanks! Now if only they’d enable it for Europe instead of forcing people to use their AltStore, which ends up costing them more, AND costing everyone else more.
