EDIT: title should end with down, not site
and it was my favorite too.
and it was my favorite too.
QUOTE said:A Grave Day
It is with great regret that we must announce the immediate closure of RomUlation. We've had a good streak in our opinion, almost a year of service where we managed to rise to being one of the most popular ROM sites, if not the most popular one. At our peak we served 35,000 people daily; pushing 241mbit/sec of data; on average we serve 25,000 people daily while pushing 80-120mbit/sec of data. This was not cheap to provide but then again, we were never in it for the money, but because we believe that the current system Nintendo use is flawed. What follows is a rant on this very topic, if you have no interest in this then I suggest you skip to the second headline where there will be some technical details for users who were premium members and about our future.
If you have followed the news lately you will know that the internet is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for people like us. First demonoid had problems with the Canadian authorities, then OiNK got raided and the admin arrested, next Divineo, a very popular modchip store got raided by Nintendo. Now on top of everything else we got a cease and desist notice from The ESA; we have no intentions of going to jail to correct an unfair situation for consumers so instead we have decided to, at least for the moment, shut the site down.
It is our belief that Nintendo gain nothing by this; does our visitor and bandwidth stats not prove this? There is a very clear need for improved customer service in this area; otherwise we would never have gotten this popular simply by providing a good service which enabled users to not waste their money on bad ports, drained milk cows and more horse games.
So Nintendo; what happens now? People will go elsewhere; there are tons of smaller ROM sites, IRC, Usenet, torrent trackers, DC++ hubs and whatnot. File sharing cannot be killed as long as prices stay high and the customer service level low. The music industry realized it a long time ago; last I checked, and mind you this was quite a while ago, more than 10% of all music was purchased online. Sadly, you have yet to realize this Nintendo. You're clinging to a legacy business model which is deprecated in todays modern society, how long until it will fail entirely? Why would we, as users, put up with buying games from a store without having tested it thoroughly to make sure it lived up to it's price tag? We wouldn't! And we shouldn't! By forcing us to close you merely send our users elsewhere. Don't fight us, ask us why we want to help people we don't know while risking our lives by breaking the law, or read on, because I'll just pretend you asked.
So this is for you Nintendo, my final attempt to better the service people get.
  * Quit allowing bullshit titles to be sold at ridiculously high prices.
  * Provide downloadable demo's of decent length that users can play on their flash carts.
  * Provide downloadable full games that can be purchased online and that people can play on their flash carts.
You have the perfect setup; loads of people have the hardware already and probably wouldn't mind paying a small price to download a full game after having verified that the game was actually worth paying for.
Hell, we'll even take it one step further and offer our help in setting up such an online shop. It would fix our problem with not being able to preview games before buying them and it would mean lower prices on the games. (lower distribution costs etc.) We'd actually love to help with that, we already have the trusted brand to function as a sort of union to act mediator.
What Happens Now
To our users who purchased points/premium membership within the last month, if you want a refund then please come on IRC and contact us. Furthermore we'd like to extend an invitation to all of our visitors to come visit us at irc for a talk about RomUlation's future. We can still keep the site running without certain systems and titles. For example we could still host PSX ISOs and Sega Saturn ISOs. If you would be interested in this then come visit us on:
network: irc.imperium.ca
channel: #romulation
If you don't know how to use IRC then get mIRC from mirc.com (don't worry about it being a trial, it will still function) and type in:
/server irc.imperium.ca -j #romulation
Leave us a message and we will check it when we are present, double click the "Seph" nickname in the user list to send me a private message if you wish to do that. Please check here for more info on IRC if that should interest you.
If you are interested in buying the RomUlation domain then please do contact me on IRC, it recieves quite a bit of search engine traffic every day from people interested in ROMs, emulation, consoles, handhelds and gaming in general. I can provide awstats/google analytic stats if needs be. The last day we measured we had 25,000 visits of which roughly 16,000 were unique for the day, so there is a lot of traffic, a good PR and a strong SE position. Only serious offers will be considered.
