I just don't get it... Nobody wants the discs at all... And when they're being bought and sold they make peanuts. Why is this? Would love to hear some reasons/beliefs/old wives tales behind it all
Proabably because they're just not interesting. You can hack, mod, change a PC game without any special equipment. So seeing a beta of a PC game has no sense of WOW, look how different it is. A console game on the other hand does have this WOW factor since it's not common to see console game mods except for a few games that get done over and over again such as Sonic or Mario. Yakumo
Yakumo said it pretty well, but I think its not as weak of a market as you make it sound. + It all depends on the right material, considering the vast amount of PC games, most of them are bound to be un-interesting as a full retail product let alone a Beta.
Also, its easy to pirate them and sell them on as 'betas', so sometimes you may not even be getting a legit disk.
PC betas are also usually pretty bug ridden by comparison to console games. You can dick around in the various Sonic 2 betas without coming across any random show stopping bugs. Sure a few levels don't work at all and some stuff crashes the game but when you look at Daikatana, a game that upon release at retail was one of the more bug ridden games ever, you see a game whose beta versions must've been insanely buggy. There is also the fact that a console beta is almost guarenteed to run on any retail version of that console out there where as a PC beta is more likely to NOT run on anything but an extremely small set of hardware that the developers had access to at the time. This gets worse the further back in time you go as older games don't like running on modern hardware with Vista or Windows 7 let alone Win3.1/95 coded games under XP. Even older DOS based titles like Rise of the Triad are picky about sound hardware as most games were. Dosbox does a pretty good job with running that stuff though. I can only imagine a beta of ROTT only supporting 1 sound card as opposed to the 12 or so different implementations it had at the final release. And with PC betas it is a lot easier to make copies of the data be it burnt to a CD-R or floppy disk as well as the fact that you don't have to do anything to a PC to get it to run 99% of software out there so long as your OS is setup properly. A SNES beta? You likely got yourself something a bit more unique in that the cart is a small batch run of PCBs with socketed EPROMs on them with the chance of finding some leftover data at the end of the EPROM after the game's last bits are. Heard of plenty of games where someone finds that the cart was erased and written to multiple times with multiple games to save on cost. How many PC betas do we know of exist in some physical form unique to the platform?
All the above are good points, but I think the major factor is that people fetishise the PC platform a lot less. You have NES collectors who want anything rare that's NES, same for Megadrive, PSX etc, but PC? There's a handful of 3DFX enthusiasts, and there's a tiny collector community for games, but that's about it. There's no demand, ergo no high prices. Also, historically PC betas have been routinely released for free by developers, and this devalues any scene around them.
Well, that´s a good question. Personally I think there is just a lack of collectors for videogames stored on mass media devices like compact disks. But that´s just my personal opinion :033:
The market for disc-based major console betas kind of disproves that "opinion". There's ample proof on this board's trading section.
Yes but those are burnt onto GD-Rs (not publicly available), Sega branded CD-Rs in the case of the SegaCD and Saturn (also not publicly available), RVT-R for the Wii (again not publicly available) and I don't know of any equivalent specialized media for the PS1/2/3 but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some out there. The fact the PS3 would need BD-R and dual layer BD-Rs make it unique solely for that reason alone. I don't think Sony ever developed any recordable UMD media for the PSP though. My point being that a game burnt to a DVD-R that came from Staples isn't anywhere near as cool as a Sega GD-R and on top of having the sheer cool factor it adds to the value for definitively being the real McCoy rather than something someone churned out using media bought at Office Depot and thrown up onto eBay for a quick $60. I know I'd be more willing to spend money on a Sega Saturn branded CD-R containing a beta build than a Verbatim or TDK CD-R if not for the knowledge that the disc is far, far, far more likely to be an original from a dev studio then purely for the cool factor.
If it was a beta of a game that never saw the light of day, it would probably be worth a fair bit more IMO. Like that Babylon 5 game that was esentially ready to release but then got axed.
There are PlayStation branded CDRs, not sure if they were solely for internal use or if Sony tried to flog them to developers. A lot of developers during the PS2 era used basic in-house printing (LightScribe or whatever) to make their preview/review discs look somewhat official. Yeah, I agree. To get this back on track, though, are you saying that if PC betas came on developer-branded media they'd suddenly attract high prices? Because I don't think that's the big issue here.
i would love to see the sensible world of soccer that was scheduled to be out for windows when the x360 was released and got axed! THAT IS THE ONLY pc beta i would be interested in.
Ive looked for two betas for the PC over the years, and they never showed up, so Im far less interested in the market. On that note, if anyone finds Stargate SG-1 The Alliance, or an early copy of Motor City Online (Need for Speed Motor City really, with single player not the public beta), do let me know
me, I would LOVE to see any playable build of Babylon 5: Into The Fire. Its a pitty stupid politics and money crap caused it to be canceled.
