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.
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.
Fair enough, I hadn’t even googled it and I now see it’s more of a formal partnership with the Foundation than I realised, so I understand where you’re coming from.
Agreeing to this sort of work is always going to be a matter of weighing those pragmatic benefits against ideological and image related concerns, and people are bound to disagree on what is right. Frank seems to be much more concerned with immediate practical outcomes than anything and I tend to agree, given the inherent time pressures of trying to preserve physical media and the volatility of a collector’s market that can so easily keep unique prototypes out of preservationist’s hands.
@gsk yeah just to close out my thoughts here - i also think Frank’s reasoning for working with them makes sense given the foundation’s goals. i just think venturing into this debate by talking about this video at all and vaguely calling it “white nationalism” on here without a lot of reasoning or grounding for doing that (beyond Karl just generally being someone who is not a reliable narrator which i agree with) doesn’t really help anyone and ended up just pissing some people off on here.
the physical retro games market has been stupid in many ways for a long time. but speculative bubbles have been in the news a lot with the NFT stuff lately. so it’s just hard for me to summon any sympathy towards people or organizations who are cashing out on speculative bubbles esp in the midst of a pandemic when a lot of people are dealing with losing their jobs/potential housing insecurity and experiencing grief from dead friends and relatives. that may be capitalism but it’s shitty and it fucking sucks.
I listen to new episodes on weekend house cleaning time so late to the party.
"It's just capitalism, stupid" is no good. It's pretty well discussed here so thank you. I'm just so annoyed hearing this and the crew tripping over form.
@KennyL Hearing everyone’s varying opinions here is good. That reminds me how in this case of shady WATA-auction connection, the bottom line is that these transactions are worth being scrutinized because it is possibly illegal collusion and there will be long term effects. I don’t care if Jobst can be a white wing nut or Frank has bias towards WATA.
People deserve to know the truth about this. I’m glad journalists like Seth Abramson are also digging deeper into this.
@KennyL in fairness to frank his “it’s just capitalism” isn’t saying capitalism is good. It’s more that it struck him that the creator of this video may have come to terms with the realities of capitalism for the first time when researching this (but without realizing it).
As a minor update, it seems that things have been blowing up in his face a little, and he just released an update addressing some of it:
There is more than a little both-sides-ism coming through here, and I’m not sure if it is wise to take anything here at face value. Potentially worth the watch just for the sake of seeing how his messaging around it all takes shape.
I did also see some “expose” on Limited Run Games that tried to implicate VGHF (and Kelsey specifically) in some spurious conspiracy around a certain LRG release.
@gsk Oh my gosh, I stumbled on this video as well. Found it either extremely ignorant or extremely dishonest. The way the narrator describes the basic details of a non-profit organization (raising money, saving money, using money on projects, people working long hours for little/no pay) but does so in a tone to imply something nefarious… really raised my hackles.
Wouldn’t you know it, none of this stuff ever came up on dude’s legal gofundme, or any of the dude’s many videos on this topic (or so I’m told: again, Not Clicking That Shit): https://www.gofundme.com/f/karl-jobst-legal-defence-fund
