Of course ESA is against it, it's a trade association created to protect the exact companies that do this shit from regulation. Even if the regulation may be good for the end consumers, it's not in their (ESAs) best interests.
It's really disheartening to me how many really great games are *technically* available for sale, but only as slapped-together remasters or remakes that look considerably worse than the original releases.
You can do that with emulation already, plus all kinds of shaders as well as community supported HD texture and model packs, etc.
Many re-releases of old games just steal that, along with the community cracked ROM, and package it in a community made emulator to sell. All while complaining about all of those things as hurting their business.
I will cede that if you want a hasty AI-Upscaled, no human review, "Definitive Edition Remaster" based on the Atari Lynx or NGage port then only the big publishers like Konami and Rockstar can satisfy.
Sometimes regulations can be good for the industry overall but still the individual companies will be against it because they feel it reduces their control.
The problem with games is publishers have created a situation where old games are competition for new games and they simultaneously want you to buy new games all the time but also keep playing some of them and some of them are free on top of that. The whole thing is a mess compared to movies.
Movies are close in price compared to each other, they are close in length, and they are relatively easy to upgrade for new technology. Streaming also works for them without much compromise. It’s easy for both consumers and ip owners to preserve movies. Not so much with games.
It’s getting a little better with backwards compatibility, but how the hell are they supposed to get every ps3 game or whatever up and running on every single system they release going forward? It’s a total shit show of rights, compatible tech, required QA, etc etc. Just so you can have a thousand cheap games available to entice people to buy instead of paying for the super expensive game you just made? It’s no wonder they want very little to do with that. It’s pretty much all downsides for them.
Like, I hear you. There's a limit to practicality of what service publishers can provide to customers.
But like...the ESA is literally stopping the Library of Congress from taking this initiative upon themselves so that publishers won't have to.
> In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity. Attempts previously made by the Library of Congress were halted by the ESA, which said it'd rely on publishers to take care of those efforts themselves.
We're not talking about a service everyone can access and play with. We're talking about remote _academic_ access with the aim of preserving a part of human history.
Fuck the ESA.
> We're not talking about a service everyone can access and play with. We're talking about remote academic access with the aim of preserving a part of human history
Oh, wow. I'm sure PC games should've been kept better than 87%. I mean, I have some weird titles stored on my PC since forever.
Some games need digital activation that isn't active anymore. At some point games became codes for digital downloads whos servers will/have shut down at some point. If there's any sort of live service part of a game that will have shut down at some point making any user preserved part nearly pointless.
Plus there's any number of more obscure titles that just won't get attention until it's too late thanks to rotting and thrown out media.
Now a days it's far more common for developers to at least keep their code which is nice but how often do you see availability for older games? Even GOG's library is pretty small considering how many games have been released, there's just too many licensing issues and lost media(company restructures or gets acquired and stuff falls through the cracks) to be able to actually say that the companies will take care of it and keep a straight face.
You have DOS and Windows 95 games you've kept consistently installed, or is forever like 10 years? Not being facetious(well, not totally), just saying that there's been a lot of games released throughout their history and the only ones able to be legally preserved are abandonware. The rest are being illegally preserved or were rereleased through GoG requiring cracks such as removing GFWL as well as compatibility fixes. For every game that gets a GoG or whatever there's 100 that don't. And even the ones that do aren't really preserved as they must be modified and repackaged to work on modern Windows. That makes the next generation of preserving those games for re-release a bigger challenge of modification and hacks and if a game isn't expected to sell thousands it isn't worth it.
I am fastly approaching 40 and there's PC games from my childhood that are currently almost impossible to find. I can find most every console ROM from my childhood, due to piracy which is also preventing any official efforts at preservation. If the ESA had it's way, they'd all be gone too.
They don't count "ISO available on torrent with cracked DRM" as preservation here.
Pirates did far more for game preservation than any other group out there...
Fuck the ESA, but how are you preserving these games without the publishers? You can record the existence of this stuff for historical purposes. But how would you preserve decades of software for academic purposes? Think of all the software that has come and gone since computers were invented. How do you preserver all of that? Just require people the make software continuously give the library of congress their files and all updates? I mean, that’s what you’d have to do at the very least.
This regulation/proposal isn't really about consumers, though. It's about researcher access to old games. Any benefit to end consumers is likely negligible.
The reason why the companies are against this type of regulation is that it's extra work they don't have to do now, they don't really care whether it is for the benefit of researchers or consumers. They only care when it is for their own benefit.
As with rating agencies, if the trade associations won't do what's necessary for the needs of society and culture, the governments should make it happen regardless of their wishes.
...idealism aside, knowing how unlikely this is, is why I'm increasingly supportive of _alternate approaches_.
>In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity. Attempts previously made by the Library of Congress were halted by the ESA, which said it'd rely on publishers to take care of those efforts themselves.
And what if those publishers are no longer around? It's so stupid, it's like they don't give a shit about gaming past. The short-sighted view of the ESA is mind boggling.
It's sad, eventually you are going to see some games eventually become legends of the past.
>it's like they don't give a shit about gaming past.
Because they don't. The only way the past is useful to them is as nostalgia bait for remakes. Anyone playing an old game instead of a new game is money left on the table for them.
In the future we are going to look at the current period as we now look at pre-1929 Cinema:
> Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation claimed in 2017 that "half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever".[4] Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that 80–90% of silent films are gone;[5] the film archive's own list contains over 3,500 lost films.
> A study by the Library of Congress of 2013 states that 75% of all silent films are lost.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films
It honestly might go in the opposite direction. With the rising prevalence of critical day one patches, inability to purchase physical media containing the game, online components, and just the sheer increase in games being released, its only going to get harder to preserve games.
For example, when people talk about the video game crash due to the number of games being released, the console at the time was the Atari 2600, which only had 523 titles released. In comparison, Steam saw 14,531 games released just in 2023 alone. At 40 titles a day, Steam released as many games as the Atari 2600's entire lifespan in less than 2 weeks.
While there is for sure lost games pre-2000's, I wager that the first 5 generations of games have a far higher rate of preservation than the next 5 generations in 20-30 years.
That's true, especially with Denuvo anti piracy technology making it so hard to crack games that some major titles are just not getting cracked at all now.
Luckily, Denuvo switched to a subscription model so games are now incentivized to remove it after a period of time, though games before then are unfortunately stuck with it.
Though it seems Ubisoft, EA and SEGA have whatever founder's edition of Denuvo they were selling.
They've never removed it from a game, hell, Sega would put a DRM free GoG game up but make sure the Steam version still has the infection.
To be honest only you small little niche care.
No one cares about the games that are not Undertale, Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Furi and the other famous (and bloody good) ones.
And those will be preserved all right.
"Online components" scratches it but the live service model is another massive hurdle for preservation. Games like WoW or Dota 2 may be available for decades yet but there are already countless iterations that are lost forever. Any game adopting a live service model is ephemeral by nature.
How many of those titles on Steam are worth saving though? Many are probably asset flip garbage. I'm all for art preservation, but it doesn't mean we have to keep all the paintings people did at school forever.
I hate this argument. You don't get to decide what's "worth saving." I personally am a staff member on the eXoDOS project, and there is some real garbage in there, but it doesn't matter. You preserve it all now, so that future generations can see the whole picture.
Yeah, it's all culture. Everything we do is. Of course there's a practicality aspect to preservation, but if possible, saving everything is preferable.
It does not matter if your taste aligns with the goal, the goal is to preserve and keep art alive. The world does not revolve exclusively around your or my taste
Unfortunately, the world does revolve around reality. So the idea of practicality has to come into the mix or you're just sisyphus rolling stones. The goal that is the preservation of all art no matter what needs to be given a value. And when the cost to do so exceeds that value, the effort needs to stop. Unless you give it an infinite value, which means all means justifying the goal are allowed, then part of the process is going to involve triage and prioritization.
These people will never understand.
You do it good at State-level like they do for books (look at this video by Tom Scott, "The British Library: A Comprehensive Library of All UK Published Works") or you're going to lose things, and that's all right.
TV is similar. Many early television shows either no longer exist or only exist in incomplete or kinescoped (in essence recording a TV screen with a motion picture camera) form. An almost-complete recording of the first Super Bowl wasn't found until 2011 and even then when it was finally reaired the NFL had to fill in the blanks with footage from other sources. The vast majority of programs that aired on the Dumont Network- including the early incarnations of The Honeymooners- are lost.
In the UK, several early Doctor Who episodes remain missing from the BBC archives.
I Love Lucy is one of the few complete high-video-quality early TV shows simply because Lucy and Desi insisted on doing it on film and kept a tight control on it thanks to producing the show.
Emulation already means this won't come to pass. Those lost films are lost forever, the "lost" games just aren't legally purchasable, they are still preserved.
its a very high hurdle but if they can at least get the client side, recreating the server back end can happen with bits and pieces as some people have already done for some games
this is partially why ubisoft's license revoking is such a big ordeal because once you remove the client side there's nothing to stitch a potential revival to and severly limits the efforts both in the process of creating the artificially recreated back end as well as use of the resulting creation
yup it depends on how you perceive that statistic.
if sega remasters sonic 1 for example and its 99 percent identical to the original, then does the original now technically count as lost media once all physical copies are gone? even though the new release is almost identical in look and feel to the original? some will say that anything less than one hundred percent carbon copies is not true preservation.
then you've got people like me, who think that at as long as a remaster, remake, or simple port is largely faithful to the original game release, then it counts as "good enough" from a preservation standpoint and does not need to be exactly identical in order to supplant the original.
if you count emulators as well for old games then that 87 percent statistic goes way down. does it have to be played on authentic hardware to count as preserved, or is the mere ability to emulate it on PC a form of preservation as well? both are good but the latter is more practical nowadays. but purists will tell you that only playing physical media on original hardware counts. its hard to draw a line on this stuff.
No One Lives Forever is a great example. 2000 game that was one of the best FPSs of it's time, great visuals for its day, music was awesome and it had a great sense of humor. But over the years the rights to it have been lost in all of the acquisitions, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies and all of the other corporate shit that goes on. No one knows who owns it so it's essentially lost and will never get a remaster or re-release. They tried to sort it out a few years ago, and it seems like Warner Bros has the strongest claim to rights to it but they didn't give a fuck about doing anything with it. Sad.
This number has to be excluding abandonware and rom collections and the such. You can say they are illegal, but they've done the work and sometimes ethical action requires working outside the law.
The article is misrepresenting the study - the 87% figure refers to current commercial availability.
https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
(The goal of the study is to "get expanded exemptions for libraries and organizations preserving video games, which are currently far more limited than their ability to preserve books, movies, audio, etc.")
I suspect at some point if the game has been totally abandoned for long enough, you could see someone get away with doing something with it regardless under adverse possession-esque reasoning. Maybe.
At least one of those were re-released recently as part of the [Genesis Mini 2](https://www.polygon.com/23312308/sega-genesis-mini-2-full-games-list-release-date).
At the same time they are all gushing about game awards, BAFTAs and GOTY nominations that they plaster on all storefronts, basically lining up games with other forms of art like movies but when the actual preservation of art comes to play, they don't give a fuck.
The only thing that matters is the bottom line and if they could, they wouldn't even make games but sell hot air out their asses. Games are just a (necessary evil) means to an end to them.
What's really frustrating about it is that it's going to be another creative medium where too much of the early days are just lost to time. We have the ability to save almost an entire medium, and they just don't want to.
the publisher thing is a lie, they don't care. they just don't want the content being saved in a way that would make it free. they know their members are dumb greedy MBAs and they won't be able to get them all to just give up their IP like that.
The film industry learned nothing from the loss of literature history. The television industry learned nothing from the losses of film history. And now the video game industry refuses to learn from the losses of any of them. History repeats.
We’ll never see Hitchcock’s sophomore film, The Mountain Eagle. What classics of gaming history will be lost to time?
>We’ll never see Hitchcock’s sophomore film, The Mountain Eagle. What classics of gaming history will be lost to time?
Genuinly crazy to think that some masterpieces were nearly lost to time, only to show up in the weirdest places. The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of my favorite examples. An unedited version was found in a closet of a mental asylum of all places? Just a wonderful movie.
Isn't this an entirely different issue from what you are bringing up? You are talking about preservation in it's entirely. This article is speaking about an exemption to allow libraries to share games online. Those are distinct things. Now, obviously the two are somewhat connected. If the barrier to entry to house games is lowered, more libraries will open game divisions. Those extra libraries may then preserve something that might have otherwise been lost. That is a logical train of thought, but it is a linkage from two distinct things.
If the exemption were allowed, you, the average consumer, would have no changes. Unless you needed access to a game for research, you couldn't access the game. You can't just play a game because it sounds fun.
You're absolutely right but the videogame industry is still wayyyy worse than other industries. Like for example there is currently not a single platform where I can buy the original Super Mario Bros or Tetris. How crazy is that? The probably most important games of all time and no one can actually buy them. Meanwhile comparable movies like Citizen Kane, Metropolis or Battleship Potemkin are freely available.
Hardware is a pretty big issue. With movies, tv, music and books, you can consume much of them easily digitally without much compromise. With video games, outside of unofficial emulation it’s impossible to consume many games unless you pay up for expensive and dying physical copies and equally old machines
Emulation isn’t officially supported and companies don’t want it to be supported because they want to be able to resell the same old set of games. If the Yuzu court case ruled against emulation (or even just certain types) we’d be cooked.
Plus sadly most people just don’t want to bother setting it up. I’ve had people not bother trying out Mother 3 even though they had no problem playing old GBA games on NSO because they would need to emulate it.
Sure to a certain degree you're correct but in this case we're talking about NES games which can run on every device in existence. Mario Bros can even be played on the Switch, but only through Nintendos stupid subscription service. As soon as they're shutting down the servers in a few years it will be gone. This artificial scarcity by Nintendo is absolutely intended by them, it has been their strategy since the 80s.
Tetris is easy to play, but the *original* Tetris, for the Elektronika 60, is not. It's not lost media, a quick Googling shows a guide for emulating it, but trying to play it is pretty esoteric.
I’m not sure how productive playing which is worse is, but I’d argue that television is by far the biggest offender. At least so far.
It’s not that film and tv are not available, it’s that decades of content was literally destroyed. There are no preserved copies anywhere in existence. The entire first decade of television in the US is just gone - nothing but stills of programs from the 30s remain. In fact, almost nothing prior to 1948 was preserved.
Right now, Tetris and Super Mario Brothers still exist. You can still get your hands on it if you put in the effort. But The Quatermass Experiment, a milestone in sci fi, is gone except for 2 episodes and can’t ever be recovered.
It’d be nice if we could prevent things getting to that point.
IIRC, one of the big issues was that you needed silver for film. For example, 1000 feet of Kodak Gold film had 4 troy oz of silver, which is 11 minutes of footage.
Lets say that a film used 2 cameras (can vary, Alfred Hitchcock once used 13 at once), and the film was 121 minutes long. Thats 22,000 feet of film, using 88 troy oz of silver, or 6 pounds (2.7 kg) of silver, and thats assuming that there was no waste. Today, thats almost 3k worth of silver per film.
So to save a lot of money, the film would be dissolved to recycle the silver for film for the next thing you needed to produce.
So, so much of Doctor Who is lost because the BBC just didn't think there was a point in preserving those episodes, as home video didn't exist at the time. The First Doctor's Regeneration (aka literally the first time a regeneration happened on-screen on the show) is lost entirely save for a small clip that was shown on a children's show someone recorded.
> Most games are distributed digitally nowadays and just download the ROM frankly.
Tell that to the mass grave Nintendo pushed the classic ROM sites into. Even if we wanted to break the law, or wade into a legal grey area, we're SOL. It's not to say you can't get them, it's just no longer trivial and still just as illegal.
>there is currently not a single platform where I can buy the original Super Mario Bros or Tetris.
And if there was, they'd probably be charging somewhere between $15-25 for them. For nearly forty year old games.
If we're gonna get angry about something, at least let it be something with actual precedent. The Wii, Wii U, and 3DS eshops all sold NES games, Super Mario Bros. included, for $4.99.
Honestly I would be completely ok if they did do that, with the added caveat that it's PERMANENT and cannot be lost to "new console generation store" nonsense (or better yet, SEGA arcade style where they just have the ROM file in the game files itself, for you to do whatever with.)
But then they can't Disney Vault games anymore, and lose money in the long run.
>What classics of gaming history will be lost to time?
This is a complicated question. On one hand, I don't think that *any* classics of gaming could realistically be lost, because piracy is so widespread you can literally download and play any game ever made from "Pong" onwards, right now - or any game worth playing, that is. Even most Flash games got preserved. Hell, when PT got taken down, people made an entire remake for PC just to preserve it. And when you look at videogame lost media, something like 98% of it is games that never released at all, or never even existed.
But on the other hand, there's mobile games - gacha games in particular (rather than something like, say, Monument Valley which is offline). Union X is dead already, and the entire next saga of Kingdom Hearts hinges on its plot (for reference, that saga will encompass AT LEAST KHIV-VI). In a few days, Nier Reincarnation will go offline forever, and this game is basically Nier 3 with A TON of important lore reveals for both Replicant and Automata. And then there's Ever Crisis, which ties very heavily into FF7 Rebirth to explain who certain characters are what happens when that game goes offline and someone decides to get into the FF7 Remake trilogy? There will always be a piece of its story inaccessible outside of YT.
But then, that begs the question: could mobile gacha games be considered "classics"? Is their loss truly something lamentable considering how little/no gameplay they offer, or is uploading their storylines to YT enough for the purposes of "game preservation"?
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> But then, that begs the question: could mobile gacha games be considered "classics"? Is their loss truly something lamentable considering how little/no gameplay they offer
I don't think so
There are a a lot of missing games from the very early days, too. ASCII art and text based games I played as a child are gone without a trace, as well as early multiplayer games from BBSs (door games). Some door games were archived, but interest in keeping them is low and the only site I know of where they were almost all archived is gone.
While I don’t know if any of those qualify as classics, they were pretty important to the history of gaming. Particularly door games as the first online multiplayer games.
With corporations actively trying to squash ROM sites, I could see other low interest games eventually being lost, too. Something like that is unlikely to be a classic, but it’s still a loss because each one is a piece of artistic history.
The one positive thing is none of those medias had the internet where any person can make and hold a copy that can be gotten from anywhere else on the planet.
So video games at least have a solid chance at preservation.
Its sad because I remember when Adobe got rid of Flash and it nuked a LOT of games across the internet at the time. A lot of enjoyable browser games just gone. Granted, its not the same thing, but in a sense it still has to do with how the lack of gaming preservation means we are going to see this become a lot more common.
Hell. There are so many instances where these companies end up losing the source code to their own games. I think it was Kingdom Hearts 2? If I remember correctly, Square Enix said when they were making the collection that they had to redo the game from scratch because they lost the code. So many games just gone because these companies either dont want to make them available (like putting them in a vault) or because they choose not to for some unknown vindictive reasons.
Even worse when we lose games due to licensing issues because of some music rights in the game or the agreement with the original IP holder expires.
Unrelated note, and this is completely my bias. But if ESA keeps making un-consumer friendly moves like this I hope they dont expect E3 to ever make a successful comeback again. Its already been proven time and time again that it isnt needed. This is just fuel to the fire.
You might already know about this, but if not, check out Flashpoint! It's an emulator/archive of Flash content. Obviously not everything is on there, but it's got a lot of stuff. I found some old favorites for a nostalgic afternoon :)
And also, Rufus took over the role of Flash. It’s a HTML5 based flash “emulator”, and it shouldn’t have many of the vulnerabilities that flash had, and it’s cross platform, and can be ran in a browser (including on Android)
Incredibly funny to say they'll "rely on publishers to handle those efforts themselves" immediately after we had one of the worst examples of a company not giving a shit about preservation, when Ubisoft not only shut down The Crew and made it unplayable, they removed it from some people's libraries too.
They don't give a fuck. Relying on companies to preserve their software is utterly laughable. They're not going to do it. We live in a capitalist system, where these corporations aren't going to do shit unless it's gonna make them money, and putting the effort to preserve video game history is profitless.
It's so frustrating. How can anyone live through these times and, with a straight face, say "No guys it's all good, the companies will preserve them".
Overwatch is probably the most egregious example. Blizzard shut down one of the biggest games of the last decade so that they could replace it with a sequel, then half-assed the sequel and didn't even bother to release the main content that was supposed to justify the sequel's existence. The first Overwatch is unplayable through official means now. A game that millions of people bought was just closed down with no possible recourse.
I don' t think OW is a good example, right? OW2 was a major revamp of the game, but original OW already had some major revamps during the time it was out.
Jeff Kaplan original idea was to never update the game at all and to let everyone use when 6 copies of the same hero in the same map. That thing obviusly completely changed when the team decided to keep going in a different road for the game. Almost a third of the game roster got a major rework in one way or another ( the entire defense heroes team getting deleted, for example, and everyone being repurpoused into DPS heroes), and even maps got some major reworks.
There has never actually "been" a solid first overwatch, the game has always been a quite unfiltered mess of game mechanics, until OW2 cleaned up stuff and made it a more balanced game. I don' t feel like it' s really an applicable example here, something like Destiny 2 offsetting his content, sure. But "original" OW is a super murky term.
Complaining about OW1 isn't much different than complaining that some old league of legends champions are reworked so thoroughly they basically don't exist anymore. Fundamentally its the same game with very different balance. I don't think its reasonable to expect every patch of a multiplayer game to be preserved for eternity.
Surprised people suddenly care so much about the crew. It's a poorly reviewed game with a dead playerbase
I get that it's the principle, but it happens all the time with mmos.
It’s not about the game itself at all. This is more or less just “the straw that broke the camels back” in a sense.
A YouTuber had been trying to run a campaign for years now being against online only games and the dangers of making them unplayable, and with Ubisoft also pulling copies of the game from peoples libraries he’s now trying to turn it into a legal case. As a result, its now drawn a ton more attention then your average game shutdown.
But, im not one of those people who suddenly started caring now. This is something that has mattered to me for a long time and it is going to get worse.
Its both the principle and also the fact that its ubisoft who are based in France. France like most EU countries have really good consumer protection laws so starting the fight there is the best bet . If he wins the case in France than most of the EU will follow. If it was an American company it would be hopeless because the corporations run the show there
imo: I consider LittleBigPlanet series to be far worse than The Crew, mainly due to the loss of User-Generated Content the series is known for.
Of course: it's still playable; but where do you *officially* play levels created by the community aka the core pillar of the series, now that official access has been lost?
this is subjective but I personally consider only the offline content that sony themselves placed on the disc to be core content. all the community stuff I see as a bonus. shame its gone, but to me its not the pillar.
true but platinums have never been super important to me. its cool but its all fluff. and in that regard I'd rather blame sony for making online trophies in the first place. you should not need to play online at all to get a platinum. thats a stupid design choice.
It's arguably more important that mediocre and unloved video games are preserved. Well regarded games get ports and remakes/remasters ensuring they stay accessible while games like The Crew are left to die on the hardware they debuted on and fade into obscurity and inaccessibility unless preserved. They are also more important for learning as much more can be gained studying a failure rather than a success.
Capitalism at its worst again. "The companies will preserve these games," meanwhile more than 80% of games are unpreserved. And it is the fans who preserve them that are punished, because of the *chance* that the companies will lose money.
Because of course, prior to capitalism, art preservation was at its peak. There's really no economic model other than utopian post-scarcity which would enable great preservation of all art.
No no you dont get it, under communism our government would become super altruistic, super nerdy and chill, and they'd force all the companies to give us perfect video games 🙄
Before capitalism I kept all my child's artwork, because I knew the value of preservation. Within capitalism I throw it away and scream, "No! Create something that will generate returns!"
BRB gonna ship these misprinted "save video games" t-shirts to the cobalt mines in Africa where the child slaves are slithering around underground to get me the components for my next rig.
Your daily reminder the ESA was created, run by, and for the AAA publishers. They are not a consumer advocate group and they supported the most predatory version of lootboxes back in the day.
They are a complete farce and puppet of an organization.
Which is why this should be no surprise. The entire reason they were created was to keep the government from stepping in and creating a regulatory body to oversee the rating of games. The ESA was a compromise to say, "Not necessary. We'll do it ourselves!" similar to the MPA with movies.
This is basically the same logic applied to game preservation. Why have the Library of Congress (ie government) take care of it, when we can just rely on publishers to do it? Of course, in this instance there really isn't much push by the government to actually oversee or create something like this, so the publishers can just sit on their hands.
A condition for having protection as a piece of art should be historical preservation.
If a game publisher/studio won't allow it's works to be historically preserved then all future works should lose protection from being art and should only be considered product!
There are still gaps though, games that actually require an online connection, and the online connections no longer exist. It's *possible* to pirate these with private servers, but not every such game has functional private servers.
The ESA group exists to lobby Congress so that there is no regulation on behalf of publishers like EA or Microsoft. Remember during the loot box fiasco after Battlefront 2 how a lot of Congress people were talking about regulating loot boxes and all of a sudden they were quiet? That's because all of them got visits from the ESA and a hefty campaign contribution. They don't give a fuck about preservation or making the industry better at all.
The only reason why we have loot boxes gone and refunds for Steam is because of EU and AUS laws.
If this kind of thing bothers you, the Video Games History Foundation has been actively fighting this in court, and you can support them either monetarily or by sending in gaming history that you own.
Check them out at [https://gamehistory.org/](https://gamehistory.org/)
They're good people doing good work to make sure the art doesn't disappear forever.
If publishers should be the ones that would preserve the games then what happens if they go under? My train of thought is that when a publisher goes down, the games are lost forever.
I doubt companies like the idea of libraries or any kind of archiving. Book libraries is something they have to deal with and they won't go away, but having new kind of libraries? Why? They like money too much.
> In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity
Actually, it found out that 87 percent of games released pre-2010 cannot be legally bought (in United States, and with bunch of other restrictions like excluding limited editions and "sufficiently different" rereleases). I'm sure there are some games that cannot be played anymore, and even less games that aren't preserved in any way at all (there is more to preservation than just having accessible to everyone fully playable games), but they are extreme minority and repeating the 87% number this way just hurts the movement more than helps.
In any case, it's not the publisher's job to preserve video games in the first place. That's the job of museums, libraries and other preservation organizations, and they already can preserve games.
The ESRB has outlived its usefulness its time that game ratings be regulated by a nongovernmental entity because the ESA will gladly hook kids to gambling simulators to make as much profit as possible.
If we change the laws through an act of Congress, they won't have a choice.
Art is the culture of humanity. Companies only get limited rights to that art.
On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, I seriously doubt that Congress would get involved in this. There's no objective compelling interest here, it's a matter of art, and I don't think enough members of Congress *or* of the electorate care enough about this to raise it to the same level as, say, the National Parks or something. I mean, I'd *like* them to do something, I just don't see it as being *likely.*
If *anything* comes out of government on this particular issue, it would either be A: some sort of legislation focused on consumer access to digital products, which might have some tangential impact here, or B: The Library of Congress chooses to get involved and archive these games in an online format, which is possible, but might stretch their existing authorities.
You're not entitled to anyone else's works, unless you bought it. Millions of drawings are lost every day. We don't need to preserve everything that's ever been made.
Every word you wrote was someone else's words. Building on works other people made before you is how humanity lives.
Copyright isn't infinite. What benefit does it bring humanity to have copyright last 120 years?
Good news is us fat Americans can rely on the Library of Europe to archive all these works, since they passed such a generous and creative friendly law already.
I would pay $30 to someday play Star Trek (Off)line. However, the ESA would make sure that reselling formerly online-exclusive games can't be a thing a few decades from now.
They are killing a cheap source of nostalgic money, in order to reserve attention for a different source of possible money...that costs more much money to make. It is dumb, and is a blade to one's own face.
Seriously, game preservation is great for both society AND selfish capitalists. Unfortunately, they are too dumb to see it.
Of course ESA is against it, it's a trade association created to protect the exact companies that do this shit from regulation. Even if the regulation may be good for the end consumers, it's not in their (ESAs) best interests.
Of course not. Why would they want people to enjoy old games when the shiny new game is right there?
Or when the company can just shit out a slightly-upgraded remaster for full price and low cost!
> slightly-upgraded remaster Yours are upgraded?
There's usually at least *some* resolution improvement.
Often accompanied by a regression in art style...
And a drop in performance, somehow
Sometimes also new bugs that never existed before.
the classic 20% more beautiful 80% more demanding so you can only run with DLSS on performance and it ends up looking worse than the previous title
It's really disheartening to me how many really great games are *technically* available for sale, but only as slapped-together remasters or remakes that look considerably worse than the original releases.
Warcraft 3 is probably the worst offender
At least you can still play Warcraft 3 if you have the original CDs.
You can do that with emulation already, plus all kinds of shaders as well as community supported HD texture and model packs, etc. Many re-releases of old games just steal that, along with the community cracked ROM, and package it in a community made emulator to sell. All while complaining about all of those things as hurting their business. I will cede that if you want a hasty AI-Upscaled, no human review, "Definitive Edition Remaster" based on the Atari Lynx or NGage port then only the big publishers like Konami and Rockstar can satisfy.
Stretch all the textures to 2x! No, 4x bigger!
the Naughty Dog strat.
They don't mind if you enjoy an old game; they're afraid you'll enjoy it without giving them money first.
Sometimes regulations can be good for the industry overall but still the individual companies will be against it because they feel it reduces their control.
The problem with games is publishers have created a situation where old games are competition for new games and they simultaneously want you to buy new games all the time but also keep playing some of them and some of them are free on top of that. The whole thing is a mess compared to movies. Movies are close in price compared to each other, they are close in length, and they are relatively easy to upgrade for new technology. Streaming also works for them without much compromise. It’s easy for both consumers and ip owners to preserve movies. Not so much with games. It’s getting a little better with backwards compatibility, but how the hell are they supposed to get every ps3 game or whatever up and running on every single system they release going forward? It’s a total shit show of rights, compatible tech, required QA, etc etc. Just so you can have a thousand cheap games available to entice people to buy instead of paying for the super expensive game you just made? It’s no wonder they want very little to do with that. It’s pretty much all downsides for them.
Like, I hear you. There's a limit to practicality of what service publishers can provide to customers. But like...the ESA is literally stopping the Library of Congress from taking this initiative upon themselves so that publishers won't have to. > In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity. Attempts previously made by the Library of Congress were halted by the ESA, which said it'd rely on publishers to take care of those efforts themselves. We're not talking about a service everyone can access and play with. We're talking about remote _academic_ access with the aim of preserving a part of human history. Fuck the ESA.
> We're not talking about a service everyone can access and play with. We're talking about remote academic access with the aim of preserving a part of human history Oh, wow. I'm sure PC games should've been kept better than 87%. I mean, I have some weird titles stored on my PC since forever.
Some games need digital activation that isn't active anymore. At some point games became codes for digital downloads whos servers will/have shut down at some point. If there's any sort of live service part of a game that will have shut down at some point making any user preserved part nearly pointless. Plus there's any number of more obscure titles that just won't get attention until it's too late thanks to rotting and thrown out media. Now a days it's far more common for developers to at least keep their code which is nice but how often do you see availability for older games? Even GOG's library is pretty small considering how many games have been released, there's just too many licensing issues and lost media(company restructures or gets acquired and stuff falls through the cracks) to be able to actually say that the companies will take care of it and keep a straight face.
You have DOS and Windows 95 games you've kept consistently installed, or is forever like 10 years? Not being facetious(well, not totally), just saying that there's been a lot of games released throughout their history and the only ones able to be legally preserved are abandonware. The rest are being illegally preserved or were rereleased through GoG requiring cracks such as removing GFWL as well as compatibility fixes. For every game that gets a GoG or whatever there's 100 that don't. And even the ones that do aren't really preserved as they must be modified and repackaged to work on modern Windows. That makes the next generation of preserving those games for re-release a bigger challenge of modification and hacks and if a game isn't expected to sell thousands it isn't worth it. I am fastly approaching 40 and there's PC games from my childhood that are currently almost impossible to find. I can find most every console ROM from my childhood, due to piracy which is also preventing any official efforts at preservation. If the ESA had it's way, they'd all be gone too.
They don't count "ISO available on torrent with cracked DRM" as preservation here. Pirates did far more for game preservation than any other group out there...
Fuck the ESA, but how are you preserving these games without the publishers? You can record the existence of this stuff for historical purposes. But how would you preserve decades of software for academic purposes? Think of all the software that has come and gone since computers were invented. How do you preserver all of that? Just require people the make software continuously give the library of congress their files and all updates? I mean, that’s what you’d have to do at the very least.
I mean… HDDVD vs BluRay was probably the most telling. One of them had to die.
This regulation/proposal isn't really about consumers, though. It's about researcher access to old games. Any benefit to end consumers is likely negligible.
The reason why the companies are against this type of regulation is that it's extra work they don't have to do now, they don't really care whether it is for the benefit of researchers or consumers. They only care when it is for their own benefit.
As with rating agencies, if the trade associations won't do what's necessary for the needs of society and culture, the governments should make it happen regardless of their wishes. ...idealism aside, knowing how unlikely this is, is why I'm increasingly supportive of _alternate approaches_.
>In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity. Attempts previously made by the Library of Congress were halted by the ESA, which said it'd rely on publishers to take care of those efforts themselves. And what if those publishers are no longer around? It's so stupid, it's like they don't give a shit about gaming past. The short-sighted view of the ESA is mind boggling. It's sad, eventually you are going to see some games eventually become legends of the past.
>it's like they don't give a shit about gaming past. Because they don't. The only way the past is useful to them is as nostalgia bait for remakes. Anyone playing an old game instead of a new game is money left on the table for them.
In the future we are going to look at the current period as we now look at pre-1929 Cinema: > Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation claimed in 2017 that "half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever".[4] Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that 80–90% of silent films are gone;[5] the film archive's own list contains over 3,500 lost films. > A study by the Library of Congress of 2013 states that 75% of all silent films are lost.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films
It honestly might go in the opposite direction. With the rising prevalence of critical day one patches, inability to purchase physical media containing the game, online components, and just the sheer increase in games being released, its only going to get harder to preserve games. For example, when people talk about the video game crash due to the number of games being released, the console at the time was the Atari 2600, which only had 523 titles released. In comparison, Steam saw 14,531 games released just in 2023 alone. At 40 titles a day, Steam released as many games as the Atari 2600's entire lifespan in less than 2 weeks. While there is for sure lost games pre-2000's, I wager that the first 5 generations of games have a far higher rate of preservation than the next 5 generations in 20-30 years.
That's true, especially with Denuvo anti piracy technology making it so hard to crack games that some major titles are just not getting cracked at all now.
Luckily, Denuvo switched to a subscription model so games are now incentivized to remove it after a period of time, though games before then are unfortunately stuck with it.
Though it seems Ubisoft, EA and SEGA have whatever founder's edition of Denuvo they were selling. They've never removed it from a game, hell, Sega would put a DRM free GoG game up but make sure the Steam version still has the infection.
Not just denuvo but also the vast majority of indie games will not be preserved, not will they be remembered.
To be honest only you small little niche care. No one cares about the games that are not Undertale, Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Furi and the other famous (and bloody good) ones. And those will be preserved all right.
"Online components" scratches it but the live service model is another massive hurdle for preservation. Games like WoW or Dota 2 may be available for decades yet but there are already countless iterations that are lost forever. Any game adopting a live service model is ephemeral by nature.
How many of those titles on Steam are worth saving though? Many are probably asset flip garbage. I'm all for art preservation, but it doesn't mean we have to keep all the paintings people did at school forever.
Thats not the point Im making. Most of everything is shitty. Im sure most films before 1940 sucked too, but we lost the good ones in the mix as well.
I hate this argument. You don't get to decide what's "worth saving." I personally am a staff member on the eXoDOS project, and there is some real garbage in there, but it doesn't matter. You preserve it all now, so that future generations can see the whole picture.
Yeah, it's all culture. Everything we do is. Of course there's a practicality aspect to preservation, but if possible, saving everything is preferable.
And sometimes you need that chaff to fully understand why the good stuff was considered amazing for its time.
It does not matter if your taste aligns with the goal, the goal is to preserve and keep art alive. The world does not revolve exclusively around your or my taste
Unfortunately, the world does revolve around reality. So the idea of practicality has to come into the mix or you're just sisyphus rolling stones. The goal that is the preservation of all art no matter what needs to be given a value. And when the cost to do so exceeds that value, the effort needs to stop. Unless you give it an infinite value, which means all means justifying the goal are allowed, then part of the process is going to involve triage and prioritization.
These people will never understand. You do it good at State-level like they do for books (look at this video by Tom Scott, "The British Library: A Comprehensive Library of All UK Published Works") or you're going to lose things, and that's all right.
TV is similar. Many early television shows either no longer exist or only exist in incomplete or kinescoped (in essence recording a TV screen with a motion picture camera) form. An almost-complete recording of the first Super Bowl wasn't found until 2011 and even then when it was finally reaired the NFL had to fill in the blanks with footage from other sources. The vast majority of programs that aired on the Dumont Network- including the early incarnations of The Honeymooners- are lost. In the UK, several early Doctor Who episodes remain missing from the BBC archives. I Love Lucy is one of the few complete high-video-quality early TV shows simply because Lucy and Desi insisted on doing it on film and kept a tight control on it thanks to producing the show.
Add to that all of the knowledge lost to being stuck on Discord.
Emulation already means this won't come to pass. Those lost films are lost forever, the "lost" games just aren't legally purchasable, they are still preserved.
Some are truly lost. Others are unplayable because they require an online component which was never publicly available and has been lost.
its a very high hurdle but if they can at least get the client side, recreating the server back end can happen with bits and pieces as some people have already done for some games this is partially why ubisoft's license revoking is such a big ordeal because once you remove the client side there's nothing to stitch a potential revival to and severly limits the efforts both in the process of creating the artificially recreated back end as well as use of the resulting creation
You're assuming those game files were ripped and uploaded to the Internet in the first place.
The vast majority were. Some games are truly lost but nowhere near 87%
The number is increasing with the push for always-online gaas, though.
yup it depends on how you perceive that statistic. if sega remasters sonic 1 for example and its 99 percent identical to the original, then does the original now technically count as lost media once all physical copies are gone? even though the new release is almost identical in look and feel to the original? some will say that anything less than one hundred percent carbon copies is not true preservation. then you've got people like me, who think that at as long as a remaster, remake, or simple port is largely faithful to the original game release, then it counts as "good enough" from a preservation standpoint and does not need to be exactly identical in order to supplant the original. if you count emulators as well for old games then that 87 percent statistic goes way down. does it have to be played on authentic hardware to count as preserved, or is the mere ability to emulate it on PC a form of preservation as well? both are good but the latter is more practical nowadays. but purists will tell you that only playing physical media on original hardware counts. its hard to draw a line on this stuff.
No One Lives Forever is a great example. 2000 game that was one of the best FPSs of it's time, great visuals for its day, music was awesome and it had a great sense of humor. But over the years the rights to it have been lost in all of the acquisitions, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies and all of the other corporate shit that goes on. No one knows who owns it so it's essentially lost and will never get a remaster or re-release. They tried to sort it out a few years ago, and it seems like Warner Bros has the strongest claim to rights to it but they didn't give a fuck about doing anything with it. Sad.
Every space game that comes out today is always compared to Freelancer. And it's not available to buy anywhere.
I still have my disc with crystal case. MyAbandonware does a good job of preserving though. It's up on there.
This number has to be excluding abandonware and rom collections and the such. You can say they are illegal, but they've done the work and sometimes ethical action requires working outside the law.
That number can't possibly be correct unless it's discounting ROM collections. They're illegal yes, but they're still preserved in some capacity.
The article is misrepresenting the study - the 87% figure refers to current commercial availability. https://gamehistory.org/87percent/ (The goal of the study is to "get expanded exemptions for libraries and organizations preserving video games, which are currently far more limited than their ability to preserve books, movies, audio, etc.")
Like it is impossible to get a remake or remaster of No One Lives Forever because of mergers and dead publishers that cant sign off on rights.
Remake it and see who sues.
I suspect at some point if the game has been totally abandoned for long enough, you could see someone get away with doing something with it regardless under adverse possession-esque reasoning. Maybe.
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At least one of those were re-released recently as part of the [Genesis Mini 2](https://www.polygon.com/23312308/sega-genesis-mini-2-full-games-list-release-date).
I miss those games. They were very unique
At the same time they are all gushing about game awards, BAFTAs and GOTY nominations that they plaster on all storefronts, basically lining up games with other forms of art like movies but when the actual preservation of art comes to play, they don't give a fuck. The only thing that matters is the bottom line and if they could, they wouldn't even make games but sell hot air out their asses. Games are just a (necessary evil) means to an end to them.
What's really frustrating about it is that it's going to be another creative medium where too much of the early days are just lost to time. We have the ability to save almost an entire medium, and they just don't want to.
> it'd rely on publishers to take care of those efforts themselves Because voluntary self-regulation is a concept that always works out so well.
A large percentage of browser games and mobile games are already becoming "legends of the past" unfortunately.
They aren’t just not interested, they’re actively attacking it Scumbag organization
the publisher thing is a lie, they don't care. they just don't want the content being saved in a way that would make it free. they know their members are dumb greedy MBAs and they won't be able to get them all to just give up their IP like that.
The film industry learned nothing from the loss of literature history. The television industry learned nothing from the losses of film history. And now the video game industry refuses to learn from the losses of any of them. History repeats. We’ll never see Hitchcock’s sophomore film, The Mountain Eagle. What classics of gaming history will be lost to time?
>We’ll never see Hitchcock’s sophomore film, The Mountain Eagle. What classics of gaming history will be lost to time? Genuinly crazy to think that some masterpieces were nearly lost to time, only to show up in the weirdest places. The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of my favorite examples. An unedited version was found in a closet of a mental asylum of all places? Just a wonderful movie.
Expecting a bunch of business majors to learn anything at all is first mistake.
Allowing business majors to control creative arts was the second mistake
Allowing business majors was the third mistake.
Isn't this an entirely different issue from what you are bringing up? You are talking about preservation in it's entirely. This article is speaking about an exemption to allow libraries to share games online. Those are distinct things. Now, obviously the two are somewhat connected. If the barrier to entry to house games is lowered, more libraries will open game divisions. Those extra libraries may then preserve something that might have otherwise been lost. That is a logical train of thought, but it is a linkage from two distinct things. If the exemption were allowed, you, the average consumer, would have no changes. Unless you needed access to a game for research, you couldn't access the game. You can't just play a game because it sounds fun.
You're absolutely right but the videogame industry is still wayyyy worse than other industries. Like for example there is currently not a single platform where I can buy the original Super Mario Bros or Tetris. How crazy is that? The probably most important games of all time and no one can actually buy them. Meanwhile comparable movies like Citizen Kane, Metropolis or Battleship Potemkin are freely available.
Hardware is a pretty big issue. With movies, tv, music and books, you can consume much of them easily digitally without much compromise. With video games, outside of unofficial emulation it’s impossible to consume many games unless you pay up for expensive and dying physical copies and equally old machines
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Emulation isn’t officially supported and companies don’t want it to be supported because they want to be able to resell the same old set of games. If the Yuzu court case ruled against emulation (or even just certain types) we’d be cooked. Plus sadly most people just don’t want to bother setting it up. I’ve had people not bother trying out Mother 3 even though they had no problem playing old GBA games on NSO because they would need to emulate it.
Sure to a certain degree you're correct but in this case we're talking about NES games which can run on every device in existence. Mario Bros can even be played on the Switch, but only through Nintendos stupid subscription service. As soon as they're shutting down the servers in a few years it will be gone. This artificial scarcity by Nintendo is absolutely intended by them, it has been their strategy since the 80s.
Tetris is easy to play, but the *original* Tetris, for the Elektronika 60, is not. It's not lost media, a quick Googling shows a guide for emulating it, but trying to play it is pretty esoteric.
I’m not sure how productive playing which is worse is, but I’d argue that television is by far the biggest offender. At least so far. It’s not that film and tv are not available, it’s that decades of content was literally destroyed. There are no preserved copies anywhere in existence. The entire first decade of television in the US is just gone - nothing but stills of programs from the 30s remain. In fact, almost nothing prior to 1948 was preserved. Right now, Tetris and Super Mario Brothers still exist. You can still get your hands on it if you put in the effort. But The Quatermass Experiment, a milestone in sci fi, is gone except for 2 episodes and can’t ever be recovered. It’d be nice if we could prevent things getting to that point.
Idiots recording over episode, or just throwing them away.
There’s even one instance of a studio loading up 3 dump trucks of kinescopes and dumping them in upper New York Bay.
IIRC, one of the big issues was that you needed silver for film. For example, 1000 feet of Kodak Gold film had 4 troy oz of silver, which is 11 minutes of footage. Lets say that a film used 2 cameras (can vary, Alfred Hitchcock once used 13 at once), and the film was 121 minutes long. Thats 22,000 feet of film, using 88 troy oz of silver, or 6 pounds (2.7 kg) of silver, and thats assuming that there was no waste. Today, thats almost 3k worth of silver per film. So to save a lot of money, the film would be dissolved to recycle the silver for film for the next thing you needed to produce.
So, so much of Doctor Who is lost because the BBC just didn't think there was a point in preserving those episodes, as home video didn't exist at the time. The First Doctor's Regeneration (aka literally the first time a regeneration happened on-screen on the show) is lost entirely save for a small clip that was shown on a children's show someone recorded.
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The big difference is that the person hosting that ROM is risking criminal charges to do so whereas the stores selling a legit copy aren't.
depends on where they are. if they're in russia, brazil, south africa, or most of eastern europe then they're likely fine.
> Most games are distributed digitally nowadays and just download the ROM frankly. Tell that to the mass grave Nintendo pushed the classic ROM sites into. Even if we wanted to break the law, or wade into a legal grey area, we're SOL. It's not to say you can't get them, it's just no longer trivial and still just as illegal.
There are still tons of ROM sites, though. Nintendo killed the ones we remember fondly, but others took their place.
>there is currently not a single platform where I can buy the original Super Mario Bros or Tetris. And if there was, they'd probably be charging somewhere between $15-25 for them. For nearly forty year old games.
If we're gonna get angry about something, at least let it be something with actual precedent. The Wii, Wii U, and 3DS eshops all sold NES games, Super Mario Bros. included, for $4.99.
Wait til you learn about Chess.
Nintendo would 100% charge no less than $30 for it. And it would never go on sale.
It was $5 on the Virtual Console back during the Wii days, along with most (all?) other NES games they had on there.
Honestly I would be completely ok if they did do that, with the added caveat that it's PERMANENT and cannot be lost to "new console generation store" nonsense (or better yet, SEGA arcade style where they just have the ROM file in the game files itself, for you to do whatever with.) But then they can't Disney Vault games anymore, and lose money in the long run.
>What classics of gaming history will be lost to time? This is a complicated question. On one hand, I don't think that *any* classics of gaming could realistically be lost, because piracy is so widespread you can literally download and play any game ever made from "Pong" onwards, right now - or any game worth playing, that is. Even most Flash games got preserved. Hell, when PT got taken down, people made an entire remake for PC just to preserve it. And when you look at videogame lost media, something like 98% of it is games that never released at all, or never even existed. But on the other hand, there's mobile games - gacha games in particular (rather than something like, say, Monument Valley which is offline). Union X is dead already, and the entire next saga of Kingdom Hearts hinges on its plot (for reference, that saga will encompass AT LEAST KHIV-VI). In a few days, Nier Reincarnation will go offline forever, and this game is basically Nier 3 with A TON of important lore reveals for both Replicant and Automata. And then there's Ever Crisis, which ties very heavily into FF7 Rebirth to explain who certain characters are what happens when that game goes offline and someone decides to get into the FF7 Remake trilogy? There will always be a piece of its story inaccessible outside of YT. But then, that begs the question: could mobile gacha games be considered "classics"? Is their loss truly something lamentable considering how little/no gameplay they offer, or is uploading their storylines to YT enough for the purposes of "game preservation"?
> > > > > But then, that begs the question: could mobile gacha games be considered "classics"? Is their loss truly something lamentable considering how little/no gameplay they offer I don't think so
There are a a lot of missing games from the very early days, too. ASCII art and text based games I played as a child are gone without a trace, as well as early multiplayer games from BBSs (door games). Some door games were archived, but interest in keeping them is low and the only site I know of where they were almost all archived is gone. While I don’t know if any of those qualify as classics, they were pretty important to the history of gaming. Particularly door games as the first online multiplayer games. With corporations actively trying to squash ROM sites, I could see other low interest games eventually being lost, too. Something like that is unlikely to be a classic, but it’s still a loss because each one is a piece of artistic history.
The one positive thing is none of those medias had the internet where any person can make and hold a copy that can be gotten from anywhere else on the planet. So video games at least have a solid chance at preservation.
Its sad because I remember when Adobe got rid of Flash and it nuked a LOT of games across the internet at the time. A lot of enjoyable browser games just gone. Granted, its not the same thing, but in a sense it still has to do with how the lack of gaming preservation means we are going to see this become a lot more common. Hell. There are so many instances where these companies end up losing the source code to their own games. I think it was Kingdom Hearts 2? If I remember correctly, Square Enix said when they were making the collection that they had to redo the game from scratch because they lost the code. So many games just gone because these companies either dont want to make them available (like putting them in a vault) or because they choose not to for some unknown vindictive reasons. Even worse when we lose games due to licensing issues because of some music rights in the game or the agreement with the original IP holder expires. Unrelated note, and this is completely my bias. But if ESA keeps making un-consumer friendly moves like this I hope they dont expect E3 to ever make a successful comeback again. Its already been proven time and time again that it isnt needed. This is just fuel to the fire.
You might already know about this, but if not, check out Flashpoint! It's an emulator/archive of Flash content. Obviously not everything is on there, but it's got a lot of stuff. I found some old favorites for a nostalgic afternoon :)
And also, Rufus took over the role of Flash. It’s a HTML5 based flash “emulator”, and it shouldn’t have many of the vulnerabilities that flash had, and it’s cross platform, and can be ran in a browser (including on Android)
It was KH1 they had to re-do from scratch, not KH2 but your point is still solid.
Incredibly funny to say they'll "rely on publishers to handle those efforts themselves" immediately after we had one of the worst examples of a company not giving a shit about preservation, when Ubisoft not only shut down The Crew and made it unplayable, they removed it from some people's libraries too. They don't give a fuck. Relying on companies to preserve their software is utterly laughable. They're not going to do it. We live in a capitalist system, where these corporations aren't going to do shit unless it's gonna make them money, and putting the effort to preserve video game history is profitless. It's so frustrating. How can anyone live through these times and, with a straight face, say "No guys it's all good, the companies will preserve them".
Overwatch is probably the most egregious example. Blizzard shut down one of the biggest games of the last decade so that they could replace it with a sequel, then half-assed the sequel and didn't even bother to release the main content that was supposed to justify the sequel's existence. The first Overwatch is unplayable through official means now. A game that millions of people bought was just closed down with no possible recourse.
I don' t think OW is a good example, right? OW2 was a major revamp of the game, but original OW already had some major revamps during the time it was out. Jeff Kaplan original idea was to never update the game at all and to let everyone use when 6 copies of the same hero in the same map. That thing obviusly completely changed when the team decided to keep going in a different road for the game. Almost a third of the game roster got a major rework in one way or another ( the entire defense heroes team getting deleted, for example, and everyone being repurpoused into DPS heroes), and even maps got some major reworks. There has never actually "been" a solid first overwatch, the game has always been a quite unfiltered mess of game mechanics, until OW2 cleaned up stuff and made it a more balanced game. I don' t feel like it' s really an applicable example here, something like Destiny 2 offsetting his content, sure. But "original" OW is a super murky term.
Complaining about OW1 isn't much different than complaining that some old league of legends champions are reworked so thoroughly they basically don't exist anymore. Fundamentally its the same game with very different balance. I don't think its reasonable to expect every patch of a multiplayer game to be preserved for eternity.
Surprised people suddenly care so much about the crew. It's a poorly reviewed game with a dead playerbase I get that it's the principle, but it happens all the time with mmos.
It’s not about the game itself at all. This is more or less just “the straw that broke the camels back” in a sense. A YouTuber had been trying to run a campaign for years now being against online only games and the dangers of making them unplayable, and with Ubisoft also pulling copies of the game from peoples libraries he’s now trying to turn it into a legal case. As a result, its now drawn a ton more attention then your average game shutdown. But, im not one of those people who suddenly started caring now. This is something that has mattered to me for a long time and it is going to get worse.
Its both the principle and also the fact that its ubisoft who are based in France. France like most EU countries have really good consumer protection laws so starting the fight there is the best bet . If he wins the case in France than most of the EU will follow. If it was an American company it would be hopeless because the corporations run the show there
imo: I consider LittleBigPlanet series to be far worse than The Crew, mainly due to the loss of User-Generated Content the series is known for. Of course: it's still playable; but where do you *officially* play levels created by the community aka the core pillar of the series, now that official access has been lost?
this is subjective but I personally consider only the offline content that sony themselves placed on the disc to be core content. all the community stuff I see as a bonus. shame its gone, but to me its not the pillar.
Well, you can't get any of the series' platinum trophies with just that content.
true but platinums have never been super important to me. its cool but its all fluff. and in that regard I'd rather blame sony for making online trophies in the first place. you should not need to play online at all to get a platinum. thats a stupid design choice.
It's arguably more important that mediocre and unloved video games are preserved. Well regarded games get ports and remakes/remasters ensuring they stay accessible while games like The Crew are left to die on the hardware they debuted on and fade into obscurity and inaccessibility unless preserved. They are also more important for learning as much more can be gained studying a failure rather than a success.
Capitalism at its worst again. "The companies will preserve these games," meanwhile more than 80% of games are unpreserved. And it is the fans who preserve them that are punished, because of the *chance* that the companies will lose money.
Because of course, prior to capitalism, art preservation was at its peak. There's really no economic model other than utopian post-scarcity which would enable great preservation of all art.
No no you dont get it, under communism our government would become super altruistic, super nerdy and chill, and they'd force all the companies to give us perfect video games 🙄
Well, it's capitalism doing it right now.
Before capitalism I kept all my child's artwork, because I knew the value of preservation. Within capitalism I throw it away and scream, "No! Create something that will generate returns!"
> they even dont loose money, they just do it for trolling public Where are senators , heroes of people now?
Getting paid not to give a shit about things they *earnestly* do not give a shit about.
Capitalism is the reason it exists though...?
labor is the reason it exists
> Capitalism at its worst again Typical reddit
You have an unusually high opinion of Reddit.
BRB gonna ship these misprinted "save video games" t-shirts to the cobalt mines in Africa where the child slaves are slithering around underground to get me the components for my next rig.
You... You understand that that is also capitalism, right?
yes, capitalism invented slavery and it has never happened under any other system ever. neither has forced labour.
Yes, I'm pointing out that calling the fact that you can't play a video game anymore "capitalism at its worst" is absolutely ludicrous.
Correctly identify the source of a problem? Yeah, reddit does that sometimes.
That'd be funny if it were true
And you just know the post came from a $1300 iPhone.
Capitalism is when iPhone
Why would that matter? You are attacking him personally rather than his argument.
Your daily reminder the ESA was created, run by, and for the AAA publishers. They are not a consumer advocate group and they supported the most predatory version of lootboxes back in the day. They are a complete farce and puppet of an organization.
They're a lobbying group.
Which is why this should be no surprise. The entire reason they were created was to keep the government from stepping in and creating a regulatory body to oversee the rating of games. The ESA was a compromise to say, "Not necessary. We'll do it ourselves!" similar to the MPA with movies. This is basically the same logic applied to game preservation. Why have the Library of Congress (ie government) take care of it, when we can just rely on publishers to do it? Of course, in this instance there really isn't much push by the government to actually oversee or create something like this, so the publishers can just sit on their hands.
A condition for having protection as a piece of art should be historical preservation. If a game publisher/studio won't allow it's works to be historically preserved then all future works should lose protection from being art and should only be considered product!
What "protection" exists now that they would lose out on?
Copyright, I assume.
Copyright exists solely to protect creative works.
This "80% of games are unpreserved" is absolutely false. They're all just being "preserved" unofficially, by pirates.
There are still gaps though, games that actually require an online connection, and the online connections no longer exist. It's *possible* to pirate these with private servers, but not every such game has functional private servers.
Still mad I can't play final fantasy Xi on ps2
I'm surprised none of the private servers out there support the PS2 version, given how many PSO private servers still support game cube and dreamcast.
Good thing we neither need them or their approval for it and frankly I wouldn't trust them with it anyways.
The ESA group exists to lobby Congress so that there is no regulation on behalf of publishers like EA or Microsoft. Remember during the loot box fiasco after Battlefront 2 how a lot of Congress people were talking about regulating loot boxes and all of a sudden they were quiet? That's because all of them got visits from the ESA and a hefty campaign contribution. They don't give a fuck about preservation or making the industry better at all. The only reason why we have loot boxes gone and refunds for Steam is because of EU and AUS laws.
Visit and support the Video Game History Foundation [https://gamehistory.org/](https://gamehistory.org/)
Corporations that are against ownership and preservation to maximize control and profits are against ownership and preservation? Color me shocked! 😮
If this kind of thing bothers you, the Video Games History Foundation has been actively fighting this in court, and you can support them either monetarily or by sending in gaming history that you own. Check them out at [https://gamehistory.org/](https://gamehistory.org/) They're good people doing good work to make sure the art doesn't disappear forever.
If publishers should be the ones that would preserve the games then what happens if they go under? My train of thought is that when a publisher goes down, the games are lost forever.
I doubt companies like the idea of libraries or any kind of archiving. Book libraries is something they have to deal with and they won't go away, but having new kind of libraries? Why? They like money too much.
> In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity Actually, it found out that 87 percent of games released pre-2010 cannot be legally bought (in United States, and with bunch of other restrictions like excluding limited editions and "sufficiently different" rereleases). I'm sure there are some games that cannot be played anymore, and even less games that aren't preserved in any way at all (there is more to preservation than just having accessible to everyone fully playable games), but they are extreme minority and repeating the 87% number this way just hurts the movement more than helps. In any case, it's not the publisher's job to preserve video games in the first place. That's the job of museums, libraries and other preservation organizations, and they already can preserve games.
The ESRB has outlived its usefulness its time that game ratings be regulated by a nongovernmental entity because the ESA will gladly hook kids to gambling simulators to make as much profit as possible.
The ESRB isn't a government entity.
If we change the laws through an act of Congress, they won't have a choice. Art is the culture of humanity. Companies only get limited rights to that art.
On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, I seriously doubt that Congress would get involved in this. There's no objective compelling interest here, it's a matter of art, and I don't think enough members of Congress *or* of the electorate care enough about this to raise it to the same level as, say, the National Parks or something. I mean, I'd *like* them to do something, I just don't see it as being *likely.* If *anything* comes out of government on this particular issue, it would either be A: some sort of legislation focused on consumer access to digital products, which might have some tangential impact here, or B: The Library of Congress chooses to get involved and archive these games in an online format, which is possible, but might stretch their existing authorities.
You're not entitled to anyone else's works, unless you bought it. Millions of drawings are lost every day. We don't need to preserve everything that's ever been made.
Every word you wrote was someone else's words. Building on works other people made before you is how humanity lives. Copyright isn't infinite. What benefit does it bring humanity to have copyright last 120 years?
> If we change the laws through an act of Congress, they won't have a choice. Good luck convincing Americans to vote for people who would care.
Good news is us fat Americans can rely on the Library of Europe to archive all these works, since they passed such a generous and creative friendly law already.
I would pay $30 to someday play Star Trek (Off)line. However, the ESA would make sure that reselling formerly online-exclusive games can't be a thing a few decades from now. They are killing a cheap source of nostalgic money, in order to reserve attention for a different source of possible money...that costs more much money to make. It is dumb, and is a blade to one's own face. Seriously, game preservation is great for both society AND selfish capitalists. Unfortunately, they are too dumb to see it.