It has come to my attention after a discussion on NESdev Discord that several NES homebrew games have been produced on cartridge in small quantities and then discontinued without a ROM release. Examples include Super Russian Roulette (whose "Get a copy here" button on its Kickstarter campaign page just redirects back to Kickstarter) and a bunch of KHan Games releases. Spook-O-Tron appears not to have been made available at all other than to Kickstarter backers.
Why are NES homebrew games taken out of print? It's not like there are minimum order quantities and long lead times for a second printing, as they're produced with CPLD mappers and flash memory, not ASIC mappers and mask ROM. One can just flash on another game using the same mapper or another mapper that the board supports, as with print-on-demand. I know things like Tetris, movie tie-in games, and league-based sports games get pulled when licenses expire. But last I checked, the vast majority of NES cart releases weren't produced in nearly enough quantity to even qualify for an opportunity to license something from an upstream licensor.
If games are discontinued because replicating them has become too expensive or too time-consuming, why is a ROM withheld? If a developer is no longer selling copies of a particular game, what measurable financial impact would mass copying of the game have on the developer? If it has to do with sales years later, I don't think NES homebrew has been around long enough for a counterpart to Buena Vista's "vault" strategy, where a movie is rereleased on home video every seven years and then put on moratorium in order to pump up the perceived resale value. Have developers produced extra cartridges in small quantities to subtly trickle onto eBay once a game becomes a collector's item? Or is it that providers of shopping cart software as a service bill sellers per available SKU?
Or would NintendoAge forums be a better venue for this question?
Why are NES homebrew games taken out of print? It's not like there are minimum order quantities and long lead times for a second printing, as they're produced with CPLD mappers and flash memory, not ASIC mappers and mask ROM. One can just flash on another game using the same mapper or another mapper that the board supports, as with print-on-demand. I know things like Tetris, movie tie-in games, and league-based sports games get pulled when licenses expire. But last I checked, the vast majority of NES cart releases weren't produced in nearly enough quantity to even qualify for an opportunity to license something from an upstream licensor.
If games are discontinued because replicating them has become too expensive or too time-consuming, why is a ROM withheld? If a developer is no longer selling copies of a particular game, what measurable financial impact would mass copying of the game have on the developer? If it has to do with sales years later, I don't think NES homebrew has been around long enough for a counterpart to Buena Vista's "vault" strategy, where a movie is rereleased on home video every seven years and then put on moratorium in order to pump up the perceived resale value. Have developers produced extra cartridges in small quantities to subtly trickle onto eBay once a game becomes a collector's item? Or is it that providers of shopping cart software as a service bill sellers per available SKU?
Or would NintendoAge forums be a better venue for this question?