There's nothing reasonable or sustainable about $16 for a 20 year old game. My immediate reaction is "Are these people serious?" followed by "What do they think they're going to sell me that a SNES emulator can't provide?"
It feels like they're insulting my intelligence, in other words.
I'm not sure why the age would affect the value. Either it's a good game or it isn't. I paid for Grand Theft Auto 3 on my phone - is that too old to have value or is it still in the value zone? I'm confused.
Now, SNES emulators are something else. It's worth pointing out that downloading ROMs is not technically legal. And (at least on the iPhone) you can't use one without jailbreaking your phone.
Pong is a good game. It cost about $100 when it first came out.
Would you pay even half that for a mobile implementation?
As to the legality of roms, let's say I own a rather extensive SNES library (including every SE game available on Android). As far as I'm concerned, my conscience is clear. Nothing wrong with format shifting.
Games do age. Something that was looked impressive 20 years ago will probably look very dated by current standards.
Great games or not, trying to sell them at a price that is two or three times that of a "premium" game like Grand Theft Auto is ludicrous. The market has been conditioned to expect mobile games to sell for a dollar or two.
You don't need to jailbreak; although MacBuildServer is down now, there are still a few websites that will exploit the Enterprise License for you. This will be "fixed" in iOS 7.1 though. SiOS (https://github.com/lmmenge/SiOS) is a good SNES emu for iPhone, I did a custom build but that isn't necessary.
I have no problem with downloading a ROM for a game I already own. Plus, you can't even prove I did it if I download it through a VPN and deleted it off my phone afterwards.
A touch interface, for one. Emulates are find and all but I find their inaccuracy frustrating more often than not. Further, it's not just a 20 year old game on an emulator. Somebody has to port it, make graphics (for what they are worth), probably localize it. Sure it's not necessarily as hard as making a game from scratch (though that could be debated), but that doesn't mean the costs aren't similar.
I have Final Fantasy 1 for my Nokia, and it's actually a port rather than an emulation. I haven't looked up the differences, but what I've found so far are:
The interface supports tapping on characters rather than selecting them with the 'directional-pad' which appears on the map when walking around.
There's at least one new area to explore.
The magic system is more like later games, using MP.
Graphics have been improved
I'm not sure how many of these are ports from the DS version, though. Possibly all of them.
Based on the screenshots of FF3 for Windows, it appears to be a port of the DS re-make rather than the Famicom original
I think they're mostly just ported. I've bought a few of the Square games on iOS and they were just the normal games with touch capabilities added on top of the old menus. No usability changes at all to accomodate modern touch patterns. There are many "click" needed to navigate some menus, which would just have been one touch or drag in a modern app. Scrolling was also laggy and glitchy.
They're not really insulting your intelligence. They are insulting your first sale rights, and your decision to buy the original game and not re-sell it later.
It feels like they're insulting my intelligence, in other words.