Hmm...why did I buy Bleem!...
I believe that, back in September of '99, I was fascinated by the idea of an emulator gone commercial, and what it meant (no longer feeling that I'm doing something 'illegal', though that feeling has passed)... so I bought it. I tried a few games, none of them worked, but I simply shrugged and said "maybe later." Well, they eventually released a new version (1.5), and...interesting, it ran a couple of games, but extremely slow. And at the time, I'd managed to buy a couple games that ran at a good speed with the previous version (a 400 Mhz P2 was used). So again, I shrugged, and figured "maybe later."...well, later almost never came, and Bleem!, a commercial emulator, never reached a usable state for some 75% of the games out there. Do I personally regret buying it? No, I didn't buy it for compatability or speed, but just an 'interesting piece of software,' but I feel that they've seriously screwed lots of people over by charging for a piece of software that should never have left beta stages (It should STILL be called a beta).
Now what do I mean by 'beta stages'? Well, simply put, it doesn't work smoothly. Take, for example ePSXe - in my opinion, it only recently left beta stages (all the 'betas' they used for testing were 'alphas' in this analogy), but they don't charge anything - so no problem there. If they want to release 'beta' software, more power to them (it's a good thing), as long as they don't charge. If they don't release their 'alphas', well, they have their (good) reasons.
