poptart wrote:That's a fart in the wind response and just whimsical. If they were that great they'd have more players and interest in the first place no? well maybe not actually which leads me to connect your points firstly no ones asking you to do anything but secondly that don't you think a good way then to encourage interest into those "great lesser known games" would precisely be to show how good they are by sharing high level replays on them? surely this is basically obvious? Would an enthusiast not benefit more if he truly loves the game by actively encouraging competition in his game of choice to give himself a reason to persevere with it should he be beaten or wish to raise the bar higher? again isn't this obvious? Would you feel satisfied you were the best if you won the tour de france because you discovered a short cut no one else had noticed?
If you remove the commerce aspect of professional sold replays you are left with no legitimate reason to horde a replay other than fear of others knowing something because you believe with that knowledge alone you will be beaten in which case you aren't that good to begin with.
I'm not arguing against sharing replays, I personally see no reason not to other than the inconvenience of recording and uploading said replay, and like you said it can encourage people to try the games for themselves. Great games doesn't always translate into a lot of players, though - if that were true, then all these shmups must be pretty crap because even the most popular ones have hardly any players. I don't know how popular they are/were in Japan, but many of my favorite shmups with the most interesting and fun scoring have next to no activity on the western sites I've checked. I do see some more from Japanese players, but I suspect most of the activity for the games I'm thinking of (Parodius and TwinBee series to take some specific examples) came and went long before online video sharing became popular, and the people with VHS's (if they even exist) have since moved on. At least some of those have popped up, such as the WR run of Parodius Da! with Pentarou (albeit just the second loop).
I wouldn't consider broadcasting your replays out to the world to be necessarily the "obvious" thing to do, though, since not everybody's playing these games for the sake of competition or is interested in a level playing field or whatever. I can't speak for actual WR-holders, but to me the competition is only a tangential aspect to these games. I wouldn't be surprised if many replays haven't been shared simply because nobody thought to do so, or they considered and thought it wasn't good enough to their satisfaction yet, etc. It took some time for Archer to upload his Great Mahou Daisakusen counterstop with Karte even though the score is literally unbeatable (though I'm guessing he just didn't set up a YouTube account before then), and sddkaede took down his 613M Dodonpachi replay at one point because he wasn't satisfied with it, even after it had been around for a while.