Gaming @kbin.social cnk @kbin.dk 12 mo. ago

87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games | Video Game History Foundation

gamehistory.org 87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games | Video Game History Foundation

New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable

33 comments

Copyright on software should be much shorter than other media.
- Copyright on software should end once it’s no longer commercially available for purchase.
  
  That seems incredibly reasonable.
This is why emulation is so important. Media must be preserved.
- We are fortunate that MAME exists.
So many games are released in a broken state and require online updates, even with the physical media in the future the game could be unplayable.
- LAN play is nearly extinct at this point. Devs will say, "hardly anyone uses it, so we didn't include it", but it's a convenient way to build a dependence on their online servers for multiplayer to curb piracy. Eventually those servers shut down, and LAN will be required to play those games multiplayer, but the feature won't be there to lean on.
  
  This is the problem I’ve started finding. I have another comment on this post about it, but I’ve bought 2 games now that have inactive servers. Because the disc still exists and I buy mostly physical, used.
  
  Can’t play them, and probably never will be able to, but the guy working the used game place didn’t alert me to the servers being shut down so it was just an unpleasant surprise…
  
  Servers are horrible for gaming. I get it when it’s something like wow, you need servers, but the games I buy I get because they appear to be single player, or can be played single player. The fuck do I need to access a server for for a single player game?
  
  I try to avoid games that require online play, but even that is getting harder because it doesn’t specify that the game could die at any time if they close the servers…
  
  I had a network card addon for ps2 -and this was when ps3 was already a few years old- logged in to play champions of norrath. No other players. But it wasn’t on a server, or perhaps it spun one up when I connected, so even way after the game itself died, I could still play online if someone else did. They didn’t, but that’s not the point.
Not according to my ROM archive.
- Right, but that's not the availability problem that this survey is highlighting. They're always going to be available illegally - no one's debating that, even the VGHF folks have said as such.
  
  The problem is that video games aren't legally protected for institutional use the same way books, movies, music, etc are.
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  I'm not sure if you said this tongue-in-cheek, but we know that they've already done this as far back as the Wii Virtual Console.
  
  Thanks to the Gigaleak, we know they have source code for tons of old titles
- Lol and the AVGN has a whole basement full of them as well…
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- I loaded up Dirt 3 a week ago and half my friends list lit me up wondering how the fuck i was running Dirt 3. (typical racing people)
  
  I uhh, bought it, like a decade ago?
  
  This is how I found out some steam games don't exist for everyone.
  
  Racing games are rotten with this due to licensing issues. I don't know how liberally Dirt indulges in licensing, but these games are not built to be sold forever, and that sucks. Mortal Kombat 9 is no longer available for sale, and they never said why exactly, but everyone suspects is because they lost the license to Freddy Kruger, who is a guest character in that game.
- There's a JavaME emulator already, and someone even started to work on a high-level 32bit era iPhone emulator.
- People saved the Game.com, of all things. As long as people are aware that something exists, they will try to emulate it.
And yet the subsequent owners after numerous acquisitions will still often pursue those who try to archive such things in the off chance they might one day re-release some niche game from 1980.
@cnk I upload my collection to archive.org
- Good idea! But I suppose that's a bit of a grey area in terms of rights?
  
  @cnk so. That is a long story. They want to be legal under the term of 'fair use'. And want to protect history of books, software, web and alike. They lost lawsuits over ebooks. It's a big problem I think. Sure copyright is to protect the writer or producer. But at the same time we can't just lose all the data from the past if we aren't allowed to archive it?!?
  
  I'm no expert in the law, but I hope we can archive old software and digitalize other content in a legal manner.

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