[busterarm]

When Labyrinthe/Horror Tour 3 leaked, the collector went absolutely apeshit and stopped giving anyone access to anything. And that was a ROM collector downstream of the collector with exclusive physical copies. It was someone who wasn't supposed to have those dumps and probably burned a lot of (if not all of) their connections. https://kotaku.com/collection-of-rare-japanese-games-leaks-o...

Keep in mind that a lot of the rare stuff ends up helping contribute to emulator development/accuracy.

The importance of devkits (and these are still hotly collected) only goes so far as decapping ICs is hard work. A finished game might show you new valid opcodes or undocumented system call you weren't aware of.

Keep in mind that the way collecting works in Japan is more about archiving and a rare few people get things into their collection because they are trusted. They're trusted to preserve it, but also entrusted not to make it available to everyone who wants to download it for free. Creators revisit prior works (or make available for resale) far more frequently than we tend to here.