New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
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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.
Yeah, I’ve stopped buying those games too. No time or attention from me unless that game can survive the situation where the server at the other end goes down. This does create a lot of grey areas though. Does Hitman count? You can technically finish the whole story mode, but the progression and replay unlocks are all stuck behind a server authentication. How about fighting games? You can play the entire competitive game locally, forever, but once the server is gone, you’ll never be able to play online again except with subpar solutions like Parsec. The way I’ve drawn my line in the sand, and I’m free to redraw it, is that Hitman is unacceptable, and the state of fighting games right now (we’ll see what happens with Multiversus and Project L) is begrudgingly acceptable.
With Multiversus, they’ve at least said that offline play will remain available.
It wasn’t available before, so I’m not sure how much I trust them.
at least java minecraft does that part right with the offline mode that switches off auth checks. for a real online server you need a login plugin then (makes sense that some form of username ownership verify is needed in that case) but for a secured LAN it is usable by default.
Fortunately, there are cracks that remove the always-online dependence of a lot of these games.
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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.
A lot of really good old movies can only be purchased on DVD because they can’t license the music for streaming.
Streaming isn’t even the goal I would shoot for for movies. You don’t get to own a copy. There is no Steam or GOG for movies, and Hollywood likes it that way. Blu Rays and their 4K equivalent are becoming more scarce, especially as exclusivity for streaming services become where the money gets made. Piracy is going to be the only way to preserve that stuff, especially when someone like WB is the exclusive rights holder and then removes the content from their service.
Rhythm games too
Games that require active servers are also not meant to be sold forever, and imho all those games should be digital only. I wish they didn’t have discs, because as a used game buyer, I have to really hope the dude working the counter is gunna tell me the servers for the game are already shut down 6 months after release… I’ve bought 2 games with inactive servers so far. Can’t play them at all unless I find someone hosting a private server who is cool with me joining to see if I even like the game, which is wildly unlikely.
I don’t buy online games for this reason, and it’s getting harder to know which ones require online to function at all. They all say “require online for network features” but don’t specify when the whole game is network features? Minefield.
Gaming is getting so damn difficult. I miss just walking in, finding a game, buying it, and knowing it would work, even if the console isn’t hooked to Wi-Fi.
Games that require active servers are also not meant to be sold forever,
I was pretty careful with my wording. I said they weren’t built to be sold forever. Maybe that’s pedantic, but I’d consider it shortsighted thinking that they can’t get the perpetual license to sell that game with those cars, just like I’d consider it shortsighted thinking that games are sold that require a connection to the publisher’s server. In either case, it’s BS.
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.
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.
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Really? Do you have a citation for this?
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…
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.
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The Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection just sold a million copies. There’s a demand for preserving retro games, and some either refuse to sell them, because maybe they want you to pay for a subscription service instead of buying just the games you want to keep forever, or sometimes the money it would cost to do the work and put them out as more than just a pack of ROM files is more expensive that the company is willing to invest in the project.
No, the real grim truth about preservation is that both it and piracy have been defeated at the same time via always-online requirements to servers that inherently won’t be running forever. Your favorite game today may not be around for you to show to someone 30 years from now who hasn’t been born yet. What if your favorite movie from before you were born didn’t survive long enough for you to see it?
In every thread I find you in, you just have the worst take.
lol what
Oh yeah those poor developers are missing out on so much money when I download a 30 year old video game that hasn’t been sold for 29 of those years. I suppose buying a used copy is the only way to support them, no? Oh wait…
@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.
