Limited Run Games : How Bad Are They?

[MintyTheCat]

Hello all,

personally, I have never bought anything from LRG myself. I tend to buy from other producers but not them. No reason.

I am watching this chap's video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaykvW7_zUA

How have you folks found LRG to be in your cases?

Cheers.

[Creamy Goodness]

The whole limited print market is janky and in that respect I don't think LRG is a whole lot better or worse than any other similar publisher. One sketchy thing that is unique to them that I can think of is if a game has a Japanese retail release and English is an available language, they will work to have the English removed so the western market has to buy their release.

[ryu]

I ended up ordering some of the Konami Collections from them because I wasn't aware those were also getting japanese retail releases (or at least the Gradius Collection is) until it was too late. The Dominus Collection came as planned and I have friends that were their customers for years. My impression was always that they were the least problematic of limited publishers.

But personally I'd always avoid them like any other limited publisher if it's possible to get a game off a normal retailer.

[Steven]

LRG is probably the best out of all of them because they actually bother to ship things, unlike some (a lot?) of the others. I have a handful of their normal edition games from that short period of time when I valued physical console releases over digital PC versions, a fault I have since corrected. Their special editions pretty much all suck, though, and largely seem to be filled with meaningless junk.

They supposedly do their best to get the latest patches on the physical media, which is pretty great, but I think every LRG game that I have later got a patch after I got the game, so ultimately it's like... yeah.

[Sumez]

I haven't watched that video, and don't really want to. But I saw someone summarize it, and it seems to make a lot of points which are really stupid. Things like them secretly reprinting games (this is a good thing!!), or points related to their useless trading cards that no one cares about anyway.

That doesn't mean LRG are good though. There's a lot of shit about toxic workplace practices that I would never defend, and of course they are now owned by Embracer whom you should ideally never want to support either (but it's hard to avoid - they own Tatsujin/Toaplan as well)

Generally though, as a consumer, my experience with them has generally been smooth. I have a few grievances however:

- US based with no European distro, so there's a hefty duty fee on everything bought from them on top of the already extremely high shipping costs. When they first started out they covered duties out of their own pocked which I thought was extremely admirable. No such charities anymore.
- Extremely shitty customer support. Takes ages to respond, usually refuses to help. Will never cancel orders, even preorders. In most other countries that practice is straight up illegal.
- Prices are pretty steep. Another thing that changed since their early days, where their releases would be much cheaper than most new Switch titles
- Frequent technical issues. Some times it's impossible to order. I've received the wrong product occasionally. Discount codes had no place to be input. Etc. etc.

On the flip side, the time to actually ship stuff is nowhere near as bad as it used to be, even though it's still bad. Common for these types of companies.

[cj iwakura]

When they were starting out, they were fine, but over time, they've gotten more and more ambitious(arrogant?) and published an exceeding amount of garbage, both in terms of what they're licensing, and the crap that comes with it.

Worse still, the games I decided to get either take too long or had poor quality products. For instance, I bought the LE of Ground Zero Texas, and it took nearly a year after the digital release, and included a """script""" that was literally the size of my palm.

Then I bought River City Girls 2, with an optional tarot deck, and the finished product's minor arcana(Eight of Wands, Knight of Swords, etc), had no artwork at all, just generic icons reprinted or duplicated as needed(1-9).

I haven't gotten anything from them since, and don't feel like I've been missing out. Retro-Bit and the like do far higher quality releases, and in far more reasonable time frames.

[neorichieb1971]

The turnaround on LRG is quite slow. I've waited up to 9 months for a release to come out.

As someone previously suggested if the title is Japanese by origin its likely to get the Super deluxe treatment in Japan - https://superdeluxegames.jp/en/collections/nsw (This is switch, look under "products" for others)

You can find super deluxe on Amazon.jp as well.

The best thing about Super Deluxe is that they are affiliated with LRG, but give you firm release dates. I have Cuphead, Cocoon and Contra on Super Deluxe and they are very nice.

[Sumez]

I think Super Deluxe *is* just LRG, isn't it?

Worse still, the games I decided to get either take too long or had poor quality products. For instance, I bought the LE of Ground Zero Texas, and it took nearly a year after the digital release, and included a """script""" that was literally the size of my palm.

Oh yeah I completely forgot to include that on my list. Their collector's stuff is usually complete garbage. Especially avoid anything that comes in a big cardboard box, because those are consistently thin flimsy empy boxes you could have probably printed a better version of on your office's LaserJet.

It's easy to just avoid those things though. But given the price they typically demand, it's borderline dishonest. It's pure whale hunting.

[Jeneki]

The majority of LRG games I'd be interested in also get an import physical, so I just buy those instead. I always do a double take when I read in a topic "X game is shipping now" while thinking "hmm I received mine last year", and then realize they're talking about one of the limited companies.

[Sumez]

A lot of LRG games got much cheaper locally available releases after their LRG ones. Such as the Livewire Cave ports, Radiant Silvergun, and many more where I aboslutely did regret importing the much more expensive LRG release!
But it's a little hard to gamble on, because a lot of games *only* come out via LRG and then never release physically again. It's honestly rare that they release games which already had earlier physical releases.

Not gonna lie, a massive portion of my Switch collection comes from Limited Run Games (kinda curiours how big a percentage they make out actually). This is not because I support LRG or approve of much of what they are doing. It's just because the types of games they put out are the types of games that I play, and for a majority of them there is nowhere else to get them.

EDIT: 58 of my Switch games are from LRG. 17 are from other such limited print style publishers. In total that makes out over 25% of my physical Switch collection. A lot of those games I'd rank among the best I'd played the past decade.

[XtraSmiley]

LRG is fine for what they are. It seems the founder is a dick, they lie about shit as a company, and take a long time to ship, although not as long as other small run companies, but over all, if they have a game you want, I guess what's the option?

Buyer be ware though, it seems their first NS2 game ($250?) is not actually a real game, but one of those digital codes on a piece of plastic, so I guess LRG is heading to oblivion as well.

I honestly think digital is the future, despite all the shit we as physical collectors hate about it. I doubt the PS6/7 will even have a disk drive.

[Sumez]

Buyer be ware though, it seems their first NS2 game ($250?) is not actually a real game, but one of those digital codes on a piece of plastic, so I guess LRG is heading to oblivion as well.

Stupid situation, because it's not really their release. Game is released by Sega and has regular wide distribution, and they are just making the collectors edition with all the extra swag, as well as the retail game which was just supplied to them by Sega. So doing this wasn't their call.

But still, selling it on their website sets an unfortunate presedent. Not so much for LRG specifically, but for physical games in general. It feels like those collector editions of Sonic Mania or Battle Garegga which didn't have the game included either but just came with a code, and LRG is supposed to be a part of the last remaining resistance to that tendency. No matter what you think of them, it's a part of their entire concept. When a Doom release turned out to require some sort of online registration just to play the game, they replaced the game to fix that.

For whatever reason the Switch has been the last bastion against a digital-only distribution of games, with a vast majority of physical "collectors" generally prefering that platform, which also describes my own habit. If a company like LRG can get away with selling game keys for the Switch 2, I'm gonna slowly start to actually buy into the predictions people have been making on that account.
Fortunately though, I've already seen a lot of pushback about it, and they took the game off their website immediately after announcing it. Maybe they are actually trying to do something about it?

[DMC]

There is also this recent video, a 90 min critique of LRG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvkZkgmpg2w
But I have limited interest in these things, so I cannot comment on the validity of the video.
Like many youtube videos it feels quite biased and sensational, so one needs to evaluate the critique with that in mind.
For example, some of the critiques in that video concerned things LRG had allegedly "considered doing" but never actually did, which seems like weak youtube filler to me.

[Sumez]

Oh wow haha. I thought that was the video that was linked earlier actually

[XtraSmiley]

Buyer be ware though, it seems their first NS2 game ($250?) is not actually a real game, but one of those digital codes on a piece of plastic, so I guess LRG is heading to oblivion as well.

Stupid situation, because it's not really their release. Game is released by Sega and has regular wide distribution, and they are just making the collectors edition with all the extra swag, as well as the retail game which was just supplied to them by Sega. So doing this wasn't their call.

But still, selling it on their website sets an unfortunate presedent. Not so much for LRG specifically, but for physical games in general. It feels like those collector editions of Sonic Mania or Battle Garegga which didn't have the game included either but just came with a code, and LRG is supposed to be a part of the last remaining resistance to that tendency. No matter what you think of them, it's a part of their entire concept. When a Doom release turned out to require some sort of online registration just to play the game, they replaced the game to fix that.

For whatever reason the Switch has been the last bastion against a digital-only distribution of games, with a vast majority of physical "collectors" generally prefering that platform, which also describes my own habit. If a company like LRG can get away with selling game keys for the Switch 2, I'm gonna slowly start to actually buy into the predictions people have been making on that account.
Fortunately though, I've already seen a lot of pushback about it, and they took the game off their website immediately after announcing it. Maybe they are actually trying to do something about it?

I fully agree with you, but LRG should NEVER have agreed to publish it, b/c yeah, their whole thing is physical games, not codes on plastic... (which ironically is what physical games really are), but yeah, not codes that require the company to run, they should be self running codes!

Digital is the future, I think we need to accept it. Maybe not immediately, but surely in the next 10 years.

[mrsmiley381]

Digital is the future, I think we need to accept it. Maybe not immediately, but surely in the next 10 years.

Once I graduated from college and started my career I barely had enough time for games. Now with a family, not only is time an issue but so is space. There comes a point where it actually makes the most financial sense to buy digital but only if you're planning to play the game before your hardware of choice is cracked so wide open that making a digital purchase is pointless barring legal considerations. Once I started hearing about all the bad business practices, people losing jobs over mean tweets, games being released before DLC was available followed by another physical release with the DLC, I really started losing interest. I'm tempted to sell it all. Already prepping to sell most of it.
Also, what sort of doppelganger skinwalker are you? I stop posting for the most part and someone who is xtra smiley materializes? Eh, you probably have far more 1CC's than I do so it's for the best.

[XtraSmiley]

Digital is the future, I think we need to accept it. Maybe not immediately, but surely in the next 10 years.

Once I graduated from college and started my career I barely had enough time for games. Now with a family, not only is time an issue but so is space. There comes a point where it actually makes the most financial sense to buy digital but only if you're planning to play the game before your hardware of choice is cracked so wide open that making a digital purchase is pointless barring legal considerations. Once I started hearing about all the bad business practices, people losing jobs over mean tweets, games being released before DLC was available followed by another physical release with the DLC, I really started losing interest. I'm tempted to sell it all. Already prepping to sell most of it.
Also, what sort of doppelganger skinwalker are you? I stop posting for the most part and someone who is xtra smiley materializes? Eh, you probably have far more 1CC's than I do so it's for the best.

Man, once again, I agree with you 100%.

That being said, I have just 1 1cc, one of the easiest shumps of all time, Thunder Force 3. Of course in non shump games, I have a few 1ccs, but I just have weak skills on the shumps, even though I love them!

[Hyperspace]

Digital may be the future, but it will never replace the feeling of actually owning the game and being a game collector. And you don't actually own the game. What happens when the game is delisted or the servers are shut down? Hopefully you can still download the game. I remember the epic game launcher servers were temporarily down. And I couldn'tt play one single game offline.

[Hyperspace]

The only thing I would say that I personally do not like with Limited Run Games is that they have expensive prices and no compitition. I was lucky enough to buy Mushisimisama for the switch from either Live Wire or Digital River for a lot cheaper than Limited Run Games. If there's another publisher, I will go with them well before considering LRG.