goonbag He said he does some contract work for them, didn’t he? And mentioned it specifically because of the perceived potential conflict when he’s commenting on something involving them. That, for me, indicates he takes conflict of interest seriously and wouldn’t knowingly do anything in his commercial activities that compromises his mission with the foundation. Whether people find it distasteful is another matter - personally I am of the Missy Elliott school of thought (“ain’t no shame ladies, do your thang/just make sure you ahead of the game”)
He’s talked openly about what he does for them: WATA offers a few tiers of prototype authentication whereby they have Frank dump the ROMs and cross-reference them with existing retail data in order to identify and verify any differences between the prototype and a standard retail game. There are three obvious benefits: one, he’s being paid to do it; two, anything that gets authenticated is also digitally archived somewhere, albeit privately; and three, being able to analyse and document each of these prototypes that comes through WATA means he can spare the preservation communities from having to potentially spend a lot of money just to identify or verify the contents for themselves.
I’m sure he’s thought it through and decided it’s worth doing in the face of whatever criticism it might attract, but I still don’t think it’s appropriate for non-profit historical societies to involve themselves with commercial appraisal—at the very least, this is a service he should be offering independently, instead of co-signing one particular business and allowing them to trade on his org’s credibility (either via personal reputation or people seeing the words “non-profit” and letting their guard down) in order to bilk people.
It seems he’s been deleting tweets mentioning WATA recently so however little criticism it might actually attract, he certainly understands it’s not a good look, and if his org wasn’t essentially just himself then I’m sure he’d be more careful to keep the commercial world at arm’s length.
Fran gsk It’s pretty casual to say that these million-dollar auctions won’t have impact on the second-hand market because yeah, there’s no immediate effect since there’s no overlapping right now. But when more rich assholes got into this like they do with whisky (and even fine art), shit is going to be real expensive. By then, it will be way hard to see through the shady shit they have been doing in the shadow.
I mean, he doesn’t really give a shit either way and has said as much—he thinks the whole vintage games market is frivolous and that people can and should just emulate all this stuff. I don’t even disagree but responding to discussions around predatory markets with “ok but your hobby’s dumb so whatever” ain’t it.