VanillaThunder:
Here's an interesting thought..
If the hardware is indeed MVS, if you will. Will you be able to convert other titles to the board and/or conversely, convert from the roms?
I think this was a bad move if you can, because when the 'leggers get a hold of the cart and reverse engineer it.. it will make single board conversions (instead of cart conversions) of their MVS games available.
Hmmmm... interesting..
This is an excellent point. However I think I can help you understand why even if/when this happens, it will not concern playmore.
Heres the thing...the main reason why playmore hates bootleggers and is trying to thwart them with this dedicated pcb rather then a cartridge thing is because of the damage these bootleggers do to their sales of the same identical legit items. Playmore could care less about those who do the hacking for fun or for themselves or just to play the games. Only the sales made (and profits made) which anyone other then they themselves make from their own items is what matters to them.
So in english...when some pirate manages to manufacture bootlegged cartridges of playmores latest mvs cart release, and sells these cartridges to unsuspecting victims, playmore is loosing all of those (would be) potential customers.
Fooling the buyers is easy to do (as most are dumb ass operators who couldn't tell a legit mvs cart from a really good fake one). However, a board would be a whole other ball game. It does not come encased in a plastic shell, so it is far easier to see and inspect. And it is far harder to "clone" as there is no previous release that utilized the same board(s) that can be retrofit with the new software. So therefore, the ONLY people who will purchase a bootlegged svc chaos pcb, are buyers who KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE BUYING. NOT buyers who are naive or innocent victims who would have otherwise purchased the legit item from a legit source.
So in conclusion, even if they are able to bootleg the board, and even if they can retrofit
the game into a standard mvs cart, the official item is so very different (and well known as such) then whatever creation they are able to build, that their sales of said creation will be limited to those who are not potential customers of playmore anyhow. Hence, why playmore does not care.
Always remember that the ability to bootleg something is worthless, unless you can mass produce and sell the bootleg for profits. So even if some loser busts his ass staying up nights and eventually cracks or hacks playmores board, it means nothing nor affects playmores sales unless that person can do what they did on a mass scale and for profit. A feat which is highly unlikely to occurr until AFTER playmore has already sold enough boards whereby preventing them from suffering what little losses (if any) they will endure in the inevitably dead aftermarket of the item by the time the bootleg is finally available.
What playmore did here was buy time. Thats pretty much it. They were pretty smart actually. They realized that preventing bootlegging is impossible; as well as un-nessessary. Rather delaying it is all that they needed to do and so they simply did that.
If you were a car thief, which car would you steal? The one with the club and the car alarm, or the one right next to it without those annoying extras? Same thing. Of course it is not impossible to steal the one with all the security, but the extra effort involved serves as a deterrent.
Billy Pitt
