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Yo ho…
Not The Onion version: “‘People might actually have fun’: Publishers squash video game preservation movement”
If folks today learned that games existed which could be played offline, had no dlc, no microtransactions, no skinner boxes. And those games were actually fun, clearly the whole industry would collapse lol.
Guess I better make a copy of the shit ton of emulated games on the thumbdrive that I have. How stupid.
This has been an issue since copyright came into being. Money is at odds with the preservation of art so shareholders are incentivized to limit access to older titles and keep control in case it turns out they can sell them for profit.
Keep circulating the tapes, as they say
TFW when your entire 1000+ game library of roms fits in a tiny corner of storage on my phone
When the programmers of these old titles are saying they’d rather have people keep playing them even if they’re only available on archive site, I say screw the publishers.
Of course!
Wow, imagine money just flowing into your account because you own the likeness of something.
Of course they’d get riled up if it sounds like that might be affected. They’d have to make something new instead of reselling their hits from 25 years ago and licensing their IP for movies and
immortal wastemerch.
Imagine if you weren’t allowed to watch your favorite movies from the 80’s or earlier unless you managed to have a still working VCR and VHS copy from your childhood. No Goonies, no Godfather, no Star Wars original trilogy. They decided to wipe these films from the face of the earth so that you could no longer enjoy them and had to go buy their new movies, exclusively, if you wanted entertainment from a film. That’s what games publishers are trying to do, so they don’t have to compete for you attention with older classics.
No Goonies, no Godfather, no Star Wars original trilogy
i would be okay with this. we should still preserve games of course, but i wouldn’t mind losing out on those movies
Good for you?
Eat shit, troll.
Sort of like how they erased all the evidence of “Sinbad’s Shazaam” and then gaslit everyone that remembered it?
Oh c’mon don’t screw with my head like that. I specifically remember seeing the “Shaq Genie movie”… Wait that was Kazaam! Dang it!
It’s just bonkers to me because they do everything for profit anyway; what the fuck profit do they get from not selling shit anymore? I said this not long ago about Nintendo, but other companies are guilty of it too. Spending money attempting to stop piracy, instead of making money by just giving customers what they fucking want. What crazy company secrets are they hiding that not continuing to sell a product is better than selling it?
Not in any way defending Nintendo - seriously, fuck them, I will pirate their entire catalogue and not feel one iota of guilt.
But, what mix of those 87% of games no longer commercially available fall into one of these three categories:
- yearly releases of game franchises (e.g. FIFA/NFL/NHL/NBA ‘94, ‘95, ‘96 etc.)
- unofficial releases (e.g. bootleg Christian NES carts)
- impossible to re-release 1:1 due to music licensing issues (anything with EA TRAX, Vice City/San Andreas etc.)
So I guess what I’m asking is, what percentage of those games aren’t economically viable to resell, or are stuck in licence limbo?
It’s like a toxic romantic partner: if I can’t make a lot of money doing this one thing, then no one can.
Come to think of it, a lot of late stage capitalism behavior is like a toxic partner.
Did you just link tvtropes with no warning?
It’s been hours …help.
I have dozens of tabs open in Edge on my phone and I use Edge there mostly for TV Tropes since the Preview Link lets me look at other tropes without having to open another tab. I’m currently reading Discworld tropes.
yes Chief, yes I did… and I did it deliberately :)
You can still watch those old films, as long as you are paying a subscription to a streaming service so the studio can keep making money off of them.
That’s what video game publishers want too. Nintendo doesn’t want to wipe SMB3 off the face of the earth. They just want to make sure the only way you can access it is to pay for Nintendo Switch Online.
*if they feel like offering it
And this is the real cost. Sorry Mario Brothers will pretty much always be available as long as Nintendo is around, but obscure games or classics with disputed Copyright will disappear.
Who is out there even trying to stream the old Sierra games? At least they are on GoG, but I know even GoG has tried to track down current copyright holders for old classics and the are plenty of orphan games where after several mergers and divestments, there is some uncertainty, and it’s not worth it for any of the potential copyright holders to sort it out and license it, and unfortunately it’s not worth it for GoG to publish it to find out if they’ll sue GoG.
This is why Abandonware is such an important concept.
Oni, Alien Vs. Predator 2, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2, MechWarrior 2/3/4, Black & White 1 and 2…
And that’s just at the top of my head. Copyright hell is awful.
One thing I’ve heard is it’s sometimes a weird stalemate where companies might have the property in their basement somewhere, but if there’s interest in it, suddenly the value will shoot up, so nobody wants to confirm it in case they’re the loser and will have it extorted from them.
I’m probably explaining it wrong. (Because it’s absolute nonsense.) But someone might know a better explanation than I.
I know there are several seminal works locked in archives or even just lost.
I couldn’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but I was considering the fate of Microprose, Sierra On-Line, and other studios that were gobbled up, disbanded, broken up, etc.
Your Mechwarrior example is a good example of licensing, where you might have defunct TTRPG studios (FASA) licensing a property to a have company it studio that has also gone though several mergers.
There should be a “use it or lose it” provision in copyright law, kind of like back in the day with what happened to “It’s A Wonderful Life”. The only reason IAWL became a Christmas classic isbecause it became public domain.
Except that that is largely not even true.
87% of games made before 2010 are completely commercially unavailable.
They do not even want to be in control of retro games to be able to sell them indefinitely.
With the exception of certain, wildly popular games they know they can still charge a high price for, they do not want the vast majority of retro games to be legally available at all.
Further, with books, film, other kinds of art… a legal carve out exception does exist for the purposes of academic study and research.
Basically, accredited academic institutions have the ability to rent those out to students, people writing studies on media and cultural history.
Video games? As of this ruling, nope, they are special, studying the history of video games functionally requires breaking the law.
They just get shoved into the vault, never to be seen again, by anyone, ever.
87% of games made before 2010 are completely commercially unavailable.
Would be interesting to know how many are unavailable because of licensing or rights issue. Racing games like NFS Underground or Most Wanted, for example, aren’t available anymore because of music license wasn’t renewed by studio.
Or many games aren’t available because the developer/publisher studio doesn’t exist anymore.
This reminds me that 90% of silent movies are lost forever because there was no effort to preserve them at the time.
If it wasn’t for people going as far deliding chips and breaking encryption, a good chunk of gaming history would be lost by now.
You can still watch those old films, as long as you are paying a subscription to a streaming service…
And they feel like releasing the content you want to watch. And they don’t try to ruin the experience by remastering it. And they don’t try to ruin the experience by upscaling or recreating the film in a different style. And they don’t triple the price of content that used to cost a quarter of what it does now. And your device is compatible with their platform, service, and encoding formats. And the DRM implementation is compatible with your device, your cables, your speakers, and your ears. And you can pay to access that content in the location you happen to be living in, which is not always your choice. And you don’t have to buy a peripheral device just to access the content. And you trust them not to enshittify everything that you held dear about the original.
And and and… so the studio can keep making money off of them.
This is such an incredibly naive take that has already been proven wrong by multiple publishers going out of their way to do exactly what you just said. There’s also a ton of abandonware which is not being sold and never will be again.
Buystream their new movies.FTFY
Americans are so obsessed with money, they forgot about actually living.
My dudes. Money is just a means to an end. It is not the end goal. Wake the fuck up.
I mean, it’s not just Americans, it’s the whole world. EA, Nintendo, Sony, Riot, Nexon, Tencent, and basically every other major gaming corporation are part of the ESA, who lobbied to kill this exemption. If left to their own devices, corporations will never do anything that could hurt their bottom line.
I started you a slow clap. Neither one of my dogs joined in, but I just wanted you to know I tried.
Which is why I bought a 16 bit Nintendo system a year ago with Super Mario / Duck Hunt and Tetris … I also bought a little 14" CRT TV that I can plug in to play everything like I did when I was ten years old.
I spent hours and hours having fun with it back then … I’m having hours and hours of fun with it now.
FYI, duck hunt was an NES game, which was an 8 bit console, the SNES was Nintendo’s 16 bit generation
Right you are Ken … I goofed because I never understood in then as a kid and seldom remember it as an adult … the original unit I have is an 8bit Nintendo system … but I’ve also been on the lookout for the 16 bit SNES and I hope to get one eventually (my favourite on that unit was F-Zero)
In my humble experience the SNES was totally where it was at! It was just advanced enough to have more complicated titles, but still had so much charm.
Happy you’re enjoying that NES though. Duck Hunt is still impressive and fun. I also loved that “click-ftinnng!” Sound of the lightgun trigger.
Lol I remember asking my mom during like, the X-Box era if we could get an NES and a couple games for a deal going on at Funcoland. She was a little confused since it was so old, but I really missed that system. I’m so glad I did. We walked out of there paying like $70 or something for the console and like 5 games. Before the retro-collector-craze really hit.
I’m pretty sure my favorite NES title turned out to be Paperboy. That game was so ridiculously hard but had such a solid loop that made you keep retrying for hours haha. Highly recommend if you haven’t played it!
If you want an SNES that’s going to take a while, but it’s definitely findable. If you want a device that can play SNES cartridges (along with many others) look into getting a Retron. It’s got NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, Famicom, Super Famicom, and Gameboy plus a place to plug in those old controllers.
Wow … I love the nostalgia of the original old units but this is definitely an option I’ll have to look into.
Lol … I feel like a 12 year old fantasizing about the latest 16bit and 32bit gaming systems
Thanks for this
Sure thing! I had an older one before my current emulation setup. It worked really well.
Shhh they’re too busy playing Sonic right now
Media needs to be future-proofed or else we risk repeating the around 75% of original silent-era films have perished and are forever lost.
Yeah corporations are terrified of you having fun without paying money to them.
Steal everything that isn’t nailed down while you’ve still got a chance.
At least Jesus is safe from burglary then.
Note that this really only affects researchers/historians who were hoping to have a copyright exemption for controlled digital lending. This would let them virtually borrow a copyrighted retro game ROM file (from an archive such as the Internet Archive) and play it via emulation through the browser. I have actually played a few retro games on IA using their browser emulator and while it is playable it wouldn’t be my first choice.
For retro game enthusiasts who weren’t aware of these browser emulators not much will change. You still have the same exemptions covering abandonware for personal use and for playing multiplayer games where the publisher has shut down the servers. No, you’re not entitled to the publisher helping you run those games but you are protected if your goal is to reverse engineer the game code in order to create your own fan-made server. Several old multiplayer games have open source servers for this!
Also if you’re playing on original hardware then of course you’re still fully in the clear to buy used cartridges, make backups of them, play them all you want. Yes, some rare are super expensive but a lot of that stuff is due to people collecting sealed and graded games which really has nothing to with actually playing games. You’re not going to spend thousands on a sealed game and then crack it open to play it when you could just buy an open copy for far cheaper or even download a ROM for free.
Anyway, yes, these publishers are idiots pushing out crap games we don’t want to play. That’s fine. If their goal was to kill retro gaming to try to force us to buy new games then they’re still a thousand miles away from that!
Classic USA
Thread closed
I feel like locating any kind of a not for profit foundation in the US is not going to end well.
