New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable

https://gamehistory.org/87percent/

by coldpie • 3 years ago

509 472 3 years ago

gamehistory.org

coldpie2• 3 years ago

See also this companion article about the study methodology: https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/

bearjaws• 3 years ago

It's going to shift to 87% don't even start due to connectivity requirements to servers that are not running anymore.

freedomben• 3 years ago

It took a couple of reads of this before I realized it was saying the same thing I was going to say. Restated: in 20 years from now, it will be 87% of games won't even start/run even if you have a copy, because they are dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source.

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

dependent on servers that aren't running anymore and are closed source.

Can't do that if it's not your server. Don't we all love "the cloud" :)

I think open sourcing the clients is easier because it's always possible, it takes the dev almost no time at all (compared to newly creating infrastructure documentation), and players don't have to set up their own infrastructure (which would probably require a lot of time as well as skill) to play offline. The downside is that server functionality would need to be recreated.

If the game is open, you can just patch out the server dependency. Is the update, "cloud" saving, or online-friends functionality crashing the whole game on startup? Stuff not actually needed to play in single player? Comment out the line where it calls that function, maybe mock a few variables, and you're all set.

A friend of mine makes a game with offline play being possible, but the main value is in the community: custom levels and online play. It's all cloud magic with google cloud this and google cloud that. Good luck pulling up that infrastructure in 20 years (having to set up a mini google datacenter, even if the components are open sourced by google in the first place, which they're almost certainly not when "sun set"). The game tries to reach the server on startup and should detect when you're offline (for me that doesn't work reliably, but firewalling google play services has weird effects on many apps), but if you just remove those calls from the game altogether, the offline parts will work with no dependencies and you can just exchange level files instead of having an online browser. Everything but realtime multiplayer would still be possible. Customizing the client code to work with much simpler infrastructure is also likely faster than trying to replicate the "cloud" setup.

mrbabbage• 3 years ago

For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...

azlev• 3 years ago

What's the definition of a classic video game?

coldpie2• 3 years ago

It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.

https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/

codetrotter• 3 years ago

From the excecutive summary of the original study:

They analysed a dataset of ~4,000 video games released in the US before 2010.

https://zenodo.org/record/7996492

skibz• 3 years ago

I'd say it's a video game of outstanding merit relative to other video games of its time.

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

What percentage would run even if they were? A lot of the cracking isn't just about bypassing some DRM, but solving compatibility issues.

Zambyte• 3 years ago

Probably most. Old Windows games run perfectly fine on WINE for the most part. I assume that makes up the majority of "classic" games.

And those that are for older consoles can usually be emulated just fine.

MSFT_Edging3• 3 years ago

There's fairly robust emulators for most consoles up to 2000. There's even full DOS/windows environment emulators for this task.

The ugly spot is the 2000s, but the ps3 and 360 emulator are quickly improving.

Wii/DS/3DS/Switch emulation is basically perfect.

spondylosaurus6• 3 years ago

It's kinda funny how GameCube emulation is still notoriously poor (remember how badly even the official Switch port of Mario Sunshine ran?) but every Nintendo console since then lends itself so well to emulation. And that's even accounting for the Wii and (3)DS's hardware gimmicks!

KingMachiavelli• 3 years ago

I'd say almost all, maybe 80-90%. WINE is a pretty great compatibility layer for anything Windows and there's large emulation community for the majority of consoles going pretty far back.

luckily the older and more obscure the game also means it's 'easier' to emulate.

devnullbrain• 3 years ago

We should really know better. The TV & film industry have already been through this.

MSFT_Edging3• 3 years ago

They prefer it this way.

Ultimately an intellectual property based economy leads to this without proactive measures limiting IP.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

Circa 1980 there was a panic over color movies fading that was spearheaded by people like Richard Scorsese who saw it as a huge cultural loss, but a major factor was that home video could turn movies like the old Wizard of Oz into gold.

At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing the colors up into separate reels before they realized even relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you keep them in a dry freezer.

iso1631• 3 years ago

You could just have a land tax, as copyright is land.

Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they value it at.

Finnucane• 3 years ago

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when the only way to see an old movie was if it showed up on TV or in a repertory theatre, if there was one nearby. And if a TV show wasn't in syndicated reruns, it just didn't exist.

sandworm1015• 3 years ago

Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available?

Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes.

But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

There was a show in the late 1980’s called Murphy’s Law about an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse like the base in Sneakers and had an asian girlfriend. It had some of the best comedic pacing I’d ever seen on TV but only made one short season and never got into syndication or home video which is too bad.

geswit2x• 3 years ago

Damn, I'm curious now

coding1232• 3 years ago

I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to "cloud own" permanently.

tibbon• 3 years ago

Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall) ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply difficult to obtain.

rcarr3• 3 years ago

For old books it's understandable but for modern books it's unforgivable. Even if the author is old school and wrote it on a typewriter or by hand, at some point that book has been digitised for production. I wanted a book recently that is paper only and was published in 2015. I emailed the publisher to request if they'd make it available as an eBook and they didn't even bother replying. Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me.

anthk5• 3 years ago

Getting some slaptick+satire comic books made after the main $COMIC_BOOK_INDUSTRY in Spain it's night impossible. And it sucks, because these comic books from the 80's are a masterpiece where the author were not tied to their editors and they innovated like never did. Think about stories close to Futurama in humor but for younger teens and without dumbing down them (political jokes and so on).

atum47• 3 years ago

I've been searching for Scrubs for a while now. I don't know if it's due to the country I live or what, but I can't find the whole show to watch.

I saw they have it on Hulu, but the app itself seems like a nightmare.

As I'm writing this post, if I try to log in Hulu I get a message "Something went wrong. Please try again later."

I guess my parents pay for a delivery service here that gives us access to Disney and Star+, but I don't know for sure if Hulu is included in the package. There are so many streaming services now a days that I can't keep track of the ones I have access to anymore.

I've been thinking about going back to torrents sites and trying to get it unofficially;

jprete• 3 years ago

You might need to go to DVD for something that old.

There are advantages to getting owned DVDs, like the fact that they can't mess with the content later. Music licensing problems are fairly common. For Scrubs Season 1 in particular, they had to change all the music around for Netflix's streamed version. The DVD version, as far as I know, has the original music.

burkaman• 3 years ago

https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/scrubs

You can select your country and see if it's legally available anywhere.

3-cheese-sundae• 3 years ago

If the original entity that owns a copyright is no longer around to enforce it, does it still have an owner?

RobotToaster3• 3 years ago

Usually someone will have bought the copyright when it was liquidated.

If it was dissolved while still owning the copyright then it becomes bona vacantia. What happens to that depends on the country, in the UK it technically becomes property of the King, and you can buy the rights from the government.

criddell3• 3 years ago

How many films and TV-sows are now not legally available?

Or if they are, they've been changed to remove material that can't be distributed. WKRP in Cincinnati is an example of this.

From the Wikipedia page for the show:

WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time, music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years, but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties.

RobotToaster3• 3 years ago

Probably the majority.

Many older works are permanently lost, or the few film copies remaining are rotting in vaults.

zokier• 3 years ago

Yeah, I found the articles comparison to Titanic bit of a miss, while it specifically might be reasonably well available, tons of classic movies and even more so tv is not, same as games. Books would have been maybe better comparison, they I think have bit better availability in general.

reaperducer3• 3 years ago

Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available?

Hundreds. Probably thousands.

A few years ago I started watching noir films. Once you get past the Criterion Collection, it gets harder and harder to find the good stuff.

A lot of it never made it to VHS. Even fewer made it to DVD. Compared with the number that were made, hardly any made it to streaming.

It's even worse for television. One example among many: 77 Sunset Strip.

xtracto2• 3 years ago

Reminded me of this article I read the other day:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent...

"The Library of Congress conducted the first comprehensive survey of silent films over the past two years and found 70% are believed to be lost. Of the nearly 11,000 silent feature films made in America between 1912 and 1930, the survey found only 14% still exist in their original format. About 11% of the films that survive only exist as foreign versions or on lower-quality formats."

It's too sad that we as a species are allowing our culture and history to be lost ... for some temporal profit of a minority of people. Any IP that is 20+ year old should be automatically free to copy.

SamuelAdams• 3 years ago

To argue the other side, why should we store things forever? Storing things and organizing them has a cost, and if modern society thinks a particular work is no longer interesting, why not let it be forgotten?

Do you think our grandchildren’s grandchildren in 2196 will still want to watch a B- level movie produced in the 1980’’s?

cush3• 3 years ago

Countless movies and shows are out of print and only available on VHS

kawogi• 3 years ago

I'm still trying to get MythBusters and DuckTales* in German. I can only find fragments on youtube and some shady websites.

I'm totally willing to pay full price, but there's simply no offer.

Edit: I just learned about justwatch.com (thanks HN!) There's one streaming service listed which offers at least two seasons for 7 € per month - including commercials :/ it became so hard to buy stuff legally.

* the available DVD are incomplete. I could fill some gaps in English.

coding1232• 3 years ago

I used to pay for Nintendo's Switch account (or whatever that was called) I was kinda frustrated with how limited the collection of NES and SNES games are available there. Played through all the Zeldas, which is great, but I wish a lot more was available. I am wondering if, for the most part, the license holder is Nintendo, it's a lot easier for them to make it available, but as soon as you get into third party developers, I imagine the people that owned the copyrights are either non findable or dead now.

mateo-• 3 years ago

And I'm sure if they posted it anyway, those owners would be findable or reanimated pretty quick :)

tenebrisalietum• 3 years ago

The NES isn't that old. 1985-1993 was when it being produced in the U.S. SNES was 1991 through 1996 or 1997. I bet both systems' Japanese counterparts were produced at least twice as long.

Entities that produced the games and likely were assigned the copyright are game companies, which should be trackable, and in some cases, still exist (like Capcom or Konami). You might have problems hunting down copyright owners for unlicensed games like the Wisdom Tree games, but those all sucked anyway.

It's not like an 8-bit computer platform where individuals produced a lot of content and are hard to find.

jjice2• 3 years ago

The thing that's so disappointing to me is that the library was _so_ much large for the Virtual Console on the Wii, and the Wii launched in '05 I think. They create artificial scarcity of the games so they can slowly roll them out or do a remaster.

It's a real shame since I _love_ old Nintendo games, they really did a fantastic job, but the limited access is sad.

droptablemain• 3 years ago

Thank goodness for so-called piracy.

kleer001• 3 years ago

I prefer the term "Freelance pro bono archivist"

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

Yeah, I know "abandonware" sounds like a euphemism (and maybe it is), but I really don't have a problem with people keeping these older things available.

(And I have written a few games in the past that are now on abandonware sites, ha ha.)

_5uxp• 3 years ago

meanwhile some of the legally available old games are just spreading virus, literally.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101899

hiatus• 3 years ago

That seems to indicate that the game has a vulnerability which can be exploited. That is very different from actively spreading a virus.

wkat42424• 3 years ago

And most old games are run within emulators (even something like dosbox) anyway. All you can do is infect that.

But in those days viruses were truly rampant. I have many Amiga disks with viruses on them. As my Amiga had no hard drive and only 1 floppy there wasn't many places for them to go though.

kroltan• 3 years ago

And some legally available contemporary mainstream games are also viruses!

Hello kernel-level anti cheat developers :)

marcodiego• 3 years ago

Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations. This doesn't benefit the public neither the artists.

There are lots of new categories where works of art (video games included) can fall into which simply didn't exist when copyrights were introduced. The worst part: as copyrights evolved it made legal access to older works harder.

I like how GoG is running their business but it doesn't include everything and laws should get modernized so that hundred of similar companies like GoG can flourish and thrive. For the cases where getting access to copyrights holder is not viable... well, for that users and fans should have the right to use, copy and distribute it legally. Nobody is making any money from works nobody can get access.

jimmaswell• 3 years ago

Unfortunately we're seeing a sudden pendulum swing towards favoring draconian creator-centric copyright laws as a kneejerk to AI. The same artists etc. who would have complained about Disney's practices a year ago now think copyright doesn't go far enough in forbidding algorithms from learning from their publicly visible work, the same way artists have learned from looking at each other's work for millenia.

thfuran• 3 years ago

Copyright law is notionally intended to benefit society (read: people). Artists are people. AI (at least in this context) is a pile of computers at some big corporation. It doesn't seem weird to suggest that there ought to be different rules for different categories of entities.

pixl97• 3 years ago

Copyright should adapt to modern world. Currently, what happens are a bunch of laws made by politicians under strong lobby from giant corporations.

I mean, by what you said, copyright did, just not how we wanted it to.

aquova• 3 years ago

I know there are many people who find this appalling and wish that companies did more to re-release their older titles, but I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles. Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point). I wish rather than taking the effort to port the game themselves, they'd be more receptive to fan preservation efforts, although some companies are more friendly towards this than others. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. The more people ask for older titles to be re-released, the more developers realize there's a market for it, so rather than release the source or future-compatible files, they instead will port the game to their latest system once a decade to resell it.

spondylosaurus6• 3 years ago

Unlike movies, where you simply need a method to playback a video and audio stream, getting interactive media to continue working isn't trivial, especially since it needs to run exactly as it did before (otherwise what's the point).

Even getting a 20-year-old console (which in the retro gaming world isn't that old) to work with a modern HDMI TV is a headache!

Despite owning the hardware and plenty of games, I had to drop a couple hundred bucks on a RetroTINK scaler to make my PS2 playable again. Which is no hate to the RetroTINK, because it's an amazing little gadget (and its output looks great), just kind of sad that it takes so much money and effort to keep playing a console I've owned since I was a kid.

cubefox4• 3 years ago

There are probably cheaper HDMI adapters, though probably with a weaker picture quality. (And latency will probably always be higher than analog, no matter what.)

luxuryballs• 3 years ago

I’ve been snagging the smaller/nicer CRT TVs from the dump here and there, there’s now a market for them… besides the problem you’ve highlighted, some old games with screen aiming devices only work on these older tech TVs, and Goodwill no longer accepts them!

rootsudo• 3 years ago

Ps2 works fine, gamecube works fine, xbox works fine - what 20yr old console is having issues with an HDMI tv? Every TV I've seen in the past 2 decades includes RCA and RGB connectors.

S-video is gone, and RF is gone. Coax is still there though, so RF modulators should still work too.

kingrazor• 3 years ago

I got lucky and snagged a 32 inch 720p TV that still had composite video connectors a few years ago. Works great with all of my consoles, as far back as my N64.

PostOnce• 3 years ago

I tried to plug in a wii the other day only to realize the TV had no RCA inputs, so I hooked the wiimotes up to the laptop for the kids and fired up the emulator...

weare138• 3 years ago

but I've frankly just accepted that emulation will be the best and perhaps only way to play a majority of these titles

The problem is the roms can't be 'legally' redistributed and there's no viable way to even legally purchase a significant portion of them anymore.

amadvance• 3 years ago

The Internet Archive has all the ROMs you may ever need.

CobrastanJorji• 3 years ago

Exactly. Relying on emulation is totally fine. The problem is that it's also illegal. If classic media goes "out of print," there needs to be a practical way to access it that isn't a crime. Old books have libraries and used book stores, but old games that only work with emulators have no legal avenues at all.

kobalsky• 3 years ago

It's cool that we have emulation to quench that "thirst"

I personally prefer when companies do not to elect to squeeze their IPs dry and have a semblance of pride on their work, as much as a for-profit company can have of course, instead of blindly chasing profits.

The other side of the coin is Ubisoft having 11 Assassin's Creed titles in development: https://www.gamingbible.com/news/11-new-assassins-creed-game...

danbolt• 3 years ago

I sometimes wonder if this environment were easier if the emulators involved were very easy to legally integrate onto modern game consoles. For example, Sony's PlayStation Classic used a GPL-licensed emulator [1] to get something out the door. It'd be more challenging to rerelease a GameCube game on PlayStation 5 though, as you'd either need to do a bunch of expensive work either porting or developing your own emulator. Dolphin's GPL license isn't set to work with a proprietary SDK.

It'd be an incredible challenge, but I wonder if the community behind emulators like Dolphin could provide a paid version of the codebase that can be licensed under the MPL. This might help keep older games legally in circulation.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/sony-using-open-sourc...

account428• 3 years ago

Dolphin's GPL license isn't set to work with a proprietary SDK.

Sony could always stop being overly protective and make the SDK publicly available under a suitable license.

costanzaDynasty• 3 years ago

It’s actually infuriating. This video game generation has offered very little major releases. However it’s still worth being apart of for the great collected editions. But the amount of games, many that were of major importance that are simply gone.

bollos• 3 years ago

Luckily on the XBOX you could at least play some older titles you might've never played pretty easily. PlayStation in that regard is, as far as I know, still lacking. The only console I've considered worthwhile for this generation is the Switch.

yason• 3 years ago

If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution. The authors nor the rights owners certainly don't see the content making money anymore (or they'd be selling it) and thus they can't lose money (that they never meant to charge in the first place).

Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.

rullelito• 3 years ago

It could also be that I make a game, then a somewhat similar sequal, and I only want to sell the sequel. What right as a consumer do you have to distribute the first one for free then?

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

The question is missing the point the parent is making. Parent is saying that the purpose of IP is to, in the long run, benefit society. As a result, we have collectively agreed ( for various definitions of agreed -- I certainly think they are way too long ) that protecting author's works for a period of time is desirable. As such, after some time has passed, why does it not end up in the same category as old published books ( public domain )?

SketchySeaBeast• 3 years ago

If the sequel isn't compelling it won't sell. It's a bad game series that relies on the first one being unavailable to sell the second.

feoren• 3 years ago

We can decide to make laws based on the society that we all want to live in. If our objective is maximizing the amount of creative work available to society, it may make sense to say that creators of those works enjoy monopoly on the reproduction and sale of those works, but do not gain the right to deprive society of the works. Some minimum good-faith effort to actually publish the works is a perfectly reasonable requirement on copyright.

TheRealPomax5• 3 years ago

Is your company still up and running? No rights, unless the company explicitly voids the copyright.

Did you go out of business but you didn't sell the copyright? No rights, unless you personally void the copyright.

Did you die, but did you have (legal) heirs? No rights, because copyright is inherited.

Are you a US citizen and you died without legal heirs? Still no rights, because (and this is the most insane one) your assets become state property and copyright is considered an asset.

The only two ways consumers will be free to distribute that first game is either by the clock running out on the copyright, or by whoever is the copyright holder explicitly legally voiding the copyright before then.

Mordisquitos• 3 years ago

What right as a consumer do you have to distribute the first one for free then?

What rights have you got to stop me from doing it?

DoughnutHole• 3 years ago

The purpose of copyright and patent law is to promote innovation.

If your new IP is so similar that it’s threatened by the mere existence of an older IP then it’s probably not innovative enough to deserve protection anyway.

adrianmonk• 3 years ago

Solution: bundle a license for the original with purchases of the sequel.

Now it is on the market, so it can't be distributed for free.

You make money off people who think they just want the original. But you also get a copy of the sequel into their hands, and they might try it and like it.

True, it's not absolute freedom to sell things precisely how you want, but it seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to me.

lincon127• 3 years ago

Well, no legal rights, obviously. But that doesn't mean that's not what ought to be the case. Laws aren't infallible, especially copyright law. If you have to break them to do something, that's hardly a reason not to do it, it's a reason to think about what you're doing.

As for the emulation of old games, this article talkes about a pretty commonly understood point, many old games simply can't be played outside emulation. This is importent to the argument as a whole because it changes how we should view these games, as they literally have no value. Art is worthless while it's isolated, it has no meaning to anyone, nothing to provide to anyone. The work of those that made it has essentially been forgotton about, and if it hasn't been forgotten, it will be. Same is true for video games, a video game does not have value until someone knows what it is. Currently these games exist in this state, they have literally no value. You couldn't find people to buy these games outside of speculative reasons because no one gives a flying fuck about these things. So when someone argues that emulation is theft, it's moot in these cases, because there's no value there, nothing to steal.

There's also less altruistic arguments for emulation that are valid too, arguments for emulating games that do still have some value. One may do it as a form of protest, they want to edit the game, they want to play it more easily, or they want to put together a comprehensive list of emulated games that everyone can have access to. There are good arguments for all of these, despite the fact that they're often illegal and sometimes may even harm the original creators. Each argument should be considered on its own merits before the action is judged as something that ought not to happen.

happymellon• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the Disney vault works exactly this way. Generate pent up demand by refusing to sell a product, which is exactly how copyright works for them.

I however agree with you and have no moral concerns if a company doesn't want to sell me a product.

chongli• 3 years ago

Copyright is supposed to strike a balance between creators and the public. That balance has been so distorted as to be unrecognizable today. It needs a reset!

jlglover• 3 years ago

Squatters rights for IP

TheRealPomax5• 3 years ago

Aye, but instead the reality is that copyright can only expire by running out its term. If a company gets acquired, its copyrights get transfered to the new owner. If a company goes out of business, the copyright either gets sold to cover bankrupcy or becomes the property of the people who owned the company. If a person holding a copyright dies, it goes to their heir(s), and finally, if someone dies without heirs, it becomes state property in the US.

The only way for a copyright to expire is either by running out its term, or by the current copyright holder voiding it.

It's such a great system.

FreshStart2• 3 years ago

Should have a yearly renewal bureaucracy..

ryoshu• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure if a copyright owner dies without heirs the copyright is orphaned, it doesn't become state property in the US. That's the problem. If the work became public domain it would make more sense.

DropInIn• 3 years ago

Hmm... So you're saying the issue is the mere existence of transferability of copyright?

Theres a pretty simple way to deal with that isn't there?

No reasonable argument can be made that licencing is inadequate to provide compensation, can there?

mertd• 3 years ago

Just playing the devil's advocate here but what if the copyright owner does not want the content distributed anymore? Maybe now they find the content distasteful or embarrassing.

criddell3• 3 years ago

Wu Tang Clan recorded an album and sold it to Martin Shkreli for $2 million (he no longer owns it). If I manage to get a copy of it, should I be able to distribute it freely?

aidenn02• 3 years ago

The original term on copyright was 28 years maximum; under that rule, most copyrighted works would already be in the public domain. I think 28 years is probably closer to the "right value" than 95 years, but I'd be okay with a bit longer.

morsch• 3 years ago

Maybe we should make it illegal to retell embarrassing stories without consent from the people involved.

matheusmoreira10• 3 years ago

Who cares what they want? I don't. Culture should belong to us, not them.

Copyright exists to allow them to turn a tidy profit so they're properly incentivized. It's not there to enable their delusions of control nor their perpetual rent seeking. They've already turned their profit, now it's time for the works to enter the public domain. Nobody cares whether they like it or not, it's human culture and it belongs to us all.

ncallaway26• 3 years ago

That's too bad! The entire bargain with copyright is that creators are granted an exclusive period with their work in exchange for the work entering the public domain.

That's the deal.

It's a complete violation of the spirit of the copyright agreement to take advantage of the financially useful period of monopoly over the work, then use the remainder of the exclusive period to try and ensure the work cannot be archived and cannot enter the public domain.

stcroixx2• 3 years ago

Temporary problem that will work itself out with time once the last creators die. After one generation under this system, nobody will create anything that isn't useless free garbage.

EatingWithForks4• 3 years ago

I would agree except for a few things.

Like, if someone distributes pornography of themselves, and they are now a nurse or something and are out of the industry + don't want their images distributed anymore, I think distributing pornography of them against their permission just because they aren't distributing it themselves sounds extremely heinous.

lamontcg2• 3 years ago

That could be handled through entirely non-voidable personality/likeness rights instead of needing to be handled through copyright law.

zirgs2• 3 years ago

What if some actor no longer wants a movie where they're portraying the main character to be distributed? Should they be allowed to do that? Should the studio be forced to stop its distribution or edit the actor out of the scenes that they appear in?

sandworm1015• 3 years ago

> If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution.

Ok. Past Futurama episodes are now $10,000 per view. That is still available and not an absurd cost (just ask anyone dealing with with patented technology). So we would need some sort of commission to decide what a reasonable cost should be, which would be a quantum leap away from free market principals.

Snild2• 3 years ago

Compulsory/statutory licensing would be one solution. As I understand it, that's what allows libraries to exist. Music on the radio (at least here in Sweden) is handled through collective licensing, which is nominally optional, but practically impossible to avoid if you want any radio money.

The incentive of exclusivity could be reasonably preserved by making the statutory license valid only after some amount of time has passed since release.

mordae• 3 years ago

I would be pretty OK with capping the price of old games at 2× median sale price during the period they were on market or $40 adjusted for average inflation since the year they were released. Applicable no sooner than 10 years since their initial release.

This should be noncontroversial.

kmeisthax2• 3 years ago

We jumped away from "free market principles" the moment we forbade copying of those past Futurama episodes for 90 years. There is nothing naturally scarce about copies of creative works; we impose artificial scarcity through a government-granted monopoly in order to allow the creation of those works to be funded through the sale of copies[0].

Having a government commission decide what is and isn't a reasonable price does smell of command economy, but creative works already exist in a command economy. The only difference is that you can't Disney Vault your shit anymore. Boo hoo. In my opinion, once you've sold your work, recouped costs, and paid everyone, you shouldn't be able to then pull the coin out of the vending machine and take works off the market. We give monopoly rights in exchange for creative works being made and publicly available, not for them to be made and then thrown into a fire.

My personal opinion as to how to fix this problem would be to authorize the Copyright Office to issue compulsory licenses to reproduce works that are over 10 years old and either are orphan works[1] or whose known owners are unwilling to license[2]. These licenses would only be issued to libraries - i.e. either government-run libraries or non-profit agencies with substantially similar goals to one, such as the Internet Archive. And if someone can actually assert both ownership and a pattern of ongoing licensing then they can cancel the compulsory licenses that the libraries get.

We can actually determine what a 'willing license' would look like by looking at comparable deals in a particular market. If whoever owns Futurama wants to charge $10,000 a view but Disney is licensing The Simpsons and Family Guy out to Netflix for a few pennies per view, then we can safely conclude that the $10,000/view price is there just to keep the work off the market. We don't need the Copyright Office to say "anything more than $X per stream is too much."

[0] This is not the only way that creativity could be funded, of course. But it's the only way that mainstream buyers of creativity are willing to participate in.

[1] Works whose current ownership is unable to be determined. A lot of the games that are legally unavailable in the VGHF study are unavailable because the owners went out of business and the rights are tied up between four different creditors who all don't know what they own.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

If you wrote this into law, copyright holders would immediately put a notice on their website that a copy of any of their films/books/music/whatever is available for sale at a cost of $1M if you write a letter to their postal mail address.

That would meet the law as "offered for sale".

It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without excessive hoops to jump through"

paulsutter• 3 years ago

Some may, but honestly few would

aidenn02• 3 years ago

This is not true for abandoned works, or works for which one cannot locate the copyright owner. The tiniest of hurdles to maintaining copyright could make a large amount of works available.

Eisenstein2• 3 years ago

It's hard to write a law that says "offered for sale for a sensible price, in form the buyer desires, and without excessive hoops to jump through"

No it isn't.

"If the work is not offered in a manner that can be purchased reasonably in a manner conforming to industry standards unless (1) it is A (2) it is not A but is B..."

Have you ever read a law?

kube-system18• 3 years ago

This idea presumes you're talking about copyrighted mass media which was distributed widely, which is only a small subset of copyrighted material. A very large amount of copyrighted material is never distributed, or is very limited in distribution to begin with.

thriftwy• 3 years ago

If it was ever published as a mass media (with a price tag), then it should be treated as mass media.

therealpygon• 3 years ago

True, but it isn’t a difficult distinction to make. The entire point of laws are to make distinctions.

floomk5• 3 years ago

So what value does that give society?

mormegil• 3 years ago

A similar (albeit weaker) regime already exists in the EU for "orphan works", i.e. works for which copyright holder(s) cannot be found or contacted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work

moomin• 3 years ago

Then there’s the hilarious case of No One Lives Forever, a well regarded game from 2000, where the ownership rights are murky with several organisations willing to say on the record that they have no idea if they own it, that they have no intention of finding out, but that if anyone attempts to resurrect the games they will find out and sue.

cubefox4• 3 years ago

Interesting:

Whether orphaned software and video games ("Abandonware") fall under the audiovisual works definition is a matter debated by scholars.[14]

[14] Maier, Henrike (2015). "Games as Cultural Heritage Copyright Challenges for Preserving (Orphan) Video Games in the EU" http://www.hiig.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Maier_JIPITEC-... (PDF). JIPITEC. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. p. 120. Retrieved 2016-01-18.

farawayzone00192• 3 years ago

If something is not legally available then copyright law ought to make it eligible for free distribution

What about stuff that's in flight? Or your IP that you've developed that is taken off the market and you are incorporating into another product? Or stuff you put out there and it flops because of timing and you plan to relaunch again in 2 years? There are many situations where this doesn't hold up.

You sentiment makes sense but implementation is tricky.

Eisenstein2• 3 years ago

This is why legislation isn't one sentence long and we also have judges.

account428• 3 years ago

What about it? Why should anyone have the right to make things unavailable but still control what others do.

lancesells• 3 years ago

This type of thinking always seems very entitled. Just because you can't obtain a copy of something in a convenient manner it should be distributed for free?

It's ok for things to die. It's ok for things to be hard to get. The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.

ncallaway26• 3 years ago

It's not okay for things to be impossible to get after it expires from copyright. That was the entire deal that was struck to allow copyright to exist. The entire bargain is that the creator gets an exclusive protection in exchange for the work entering the public domain.

If the work doesn't enter the public domain, then it shouldn't have received a copyright protection.

vkou• 3 years ago

The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.

The world also doesn't need any more media created, the amount of good - no, great - media that I'd like to consume that already exists is vastly greater than the amount of time I have in my life to consume it.

Given that state of affairs, why do we even need any laws that encourage the production of new media?

I mean, I'm highly sympathetic to the situation of the starving artist, but I'm not at all sympathetic to the situation of his publisher. If copyright, and the creative industry, and all of its production of new works disappeared tomorrow, it would have no meaningful impact on my life.

The world doesn't need any more media created.

wiseowise• 3 years ago

It's ok for things to die.

Maybe, you’re free to let things you care about go die. I don’t.

It's ok for things to be hard to get.

Not if it’s artificial restriction that prevents me enjoying things I like.

The world doesn't need all media available at all times to everyone.

Says who?

scheeseman4865• 3 years ago

Entitlement isn't an inherently bad word. Current copyright law has limits, facilitating the removal of distribution monopolies of works once an expiry date is hit, after which the law entitles me to do whatever I want with those works.

Your second paragraph could only be written by someone blind or ignorant to historical analysis and it's importance.

jedberg7• 3 years ago

This is one of those things that a bit of technology could so easily resolve.

The government sets up a website where you can upload the work you want to copyright and register yourself as the owner. If it's something like software, you must upload the code. It wouldn't be visible to anyone, but would be there in case the copyright expires.

If someone wants to use your work, they can contact you though the website.

If you don't reply (edit: this should say acknowledge) in some reasonable amount of time (say three months), then the copyright is considered abandoned and the work enters the public domain.

For existing works, give people say two years to upload and register. Anything not registered (or at least marked as "in dispute") becomes public domain.

This at least solves the abandoned works problem, as well as the archiving problem. After 100ish years, we'd have a copy of every work as it enters the public domain.

LegitShady2• 3 years ago

If you don't reply in some reasonable amount of time (say three months), then the copyright is considered abandoned and the work enters the public domain.

I'm not sure why I'm legally required to respond to requests for the use of my copyrighted works. I can simply ignore them. Requiring that I respond to them will create an undue burden on me.

I don't mind as long as I can bill you personally for forcing me to hire someone to respond to such requests, at a reasonable rate for a legal attorney with a specialty in copyright. He can even provide invoices, although the time required to produce the invoice will be included in the invoice.

xeonmc• 3 years ago

So basically government-mandated NFTs?

dnissley• 3 years ago

Uploading the work itself doesn't seem like it would work in a lot of cases. I'm picturing e.g. Google trying to upload their entire monorepo with hundreds of thousands of file changes per day -- to what end exactly?

ivlad2• 3 years ago

The government sets up a website

What government? World government? Yours? Mine? Who will pay for it? What will happen is an author is hit by a car and falls into coma? How will authorship be established? Worldwide federated authentication of authors? How will it work of authors in Iran?

Technosolutuonists are funny sometimes. “Just add a little bit of blockchain”.

ncallaway26• 3 years ago

I generally think that copyright should have to be extended every 5 years for an escalating fee. Part of the scheme is that to extend the copyright, you must list contact information for the current owners of the copyright. All these numbers below are purely examples of the kind of scaling I think should exist

So, from creation 0-5 years everything is automatically instantly copyrighted (as it is today). 5-10 years you must manually extend the copyright and it costs $500/work. 10-15 years it should cost $5,000/work. 15-20 years $100,000/work. 20-25 years $500,000/work, etc. By the time we're at 50 years, an additional 5 years registration should cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and would only be done for the _most_ important properties (like The Mouse).

(In my ideal world, these fees would go into an arts fund in the federal government that could be used to encourage the creation of less financially viable arts, like local theatre programs, arts education for children, etc)

In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value in not being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked up. There'd be absolutely no business case for it.

dontlaugh3• 3 years ago

Or even simpler: 5 years and you can extend it twice. That’s it.

mcast• 3 years ago

It would probably make more sense for copyright fees to be proportional to the revenue the company makes. Disney paying $500 to license Mickey Mouse after 5 years while making millions isn't equitable for a small business copyrighting a toy brand for instance.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 3 years ago

When Marvel releases a new movie, some absurdly large chunk of revenue is earned in the first 5 years.

Why allow them to extend it at all? Even 5 years is excessive, give them 18 months. Disallow it entirely for any work that was ever released with DRM. And since we're talking video games, I'm not certain that online games count as being DRM-free... if it can't be 100% self-hosted, no copyright for you.

What Blizzard did to bnetd was shameful

101008• 3 years ago

so let's say I wrote a book that I like it, some people like it but it was far from a success -and I want to prevent from being copied, I have to pay $100k after 15 years? In publishing times that's not much, books published in 2008 would have to pay that to avoid being copied and distributed freely.

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

This system may create weird incentives though.

Say I make an indie game to sell on steam, earning a meager but acceptable income from it, and I want to provide it 15 years of patches and updates (not unseen in indie games).

Does updating it with a new patch adding a few features count as a new work or the same one? Or should I instead not do updates, but make a "part 2" instead since that's a new work? But then it's not the same game anymore and it may be a worse experience for players to have to get two separate games, rather than one improved one!

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

As a sometimes-author and indie game dev, I find the sound of that to be exhausting. Tiny companies, and individuals especially, find it hard enough to deal with weird regulations and costs.

Like, some retired Grandma who writes popular mysteries is going to have to pay the government regularly to keep amazon from selling thousands of copies of her work without having to pay her?

Everyone who makes a side project game on itch.io has to keep it online forever, or they lose rights to it forever?

adamc3• 3 years ago

On many levels, this would not work well. A quick example: Stories written for children typically do not generate as much revenue per year. They make up for that, eventually (if they are popular) because they are new to every new cohort of children, so that stories like "The Pokey Little Puppy" get sold for decades before falling out of favor.

Your scheme would make writing children's stories less attractive.

In general, overly clever schemes like this often do not work as anticipated.

elektrontamer3• 3 years ago

A government getting ungodly sums of money to do a very complicated task when they can't even manage the simplest tasks without corruption or mismanagement?

michaelmrose• 3 years ago

"The mouse" isn't an abstract entity you can copyright instead you would have to copyright countless actual works and the price to keep hundreds or thousands of individual works would be essentially billions to keep "the mouse". While this is an interesting concept if the practical effect is to end most copyrights within 20 years wouldn't it be simpler just to do that?

tryptophan• 3 years ago

I think first 5 years should be free, then the author declares the value of their work to be X and pays a yearly tax of 0.05 * X to keep for copyright for as long as they want.

To make sure they dont put a low X, have anyone be able to buy the copyright from the author for X. If someone wants to buy, author can raise X to keep their copyright.

This is a nice system because it is naturally progressive and balanced, huge corps with billion $ IP will finally start paying a ton to have the gov keep enforcing their copyrights.

jlg23• 3 years ago

In such a scheme if a work is particularly valuable (either because it's being mass distributed, or because it has value in not being mass distributed), then the owner could maintain the copyright, but it would just be totally financially non-viable for these kinds of abandoned games to remain locked up. There'd be absolutely no business case for it.

Value is in they eye of the beholder. If someone makes $30/month from an indie game they developed 30 years ago, is it ok to take those 30 because they ain't 3 million?

I genuinely like the idea of regularly having to renew the claim to copyright, though.

ta988• 3 years ago

So every broke artist that cannot afford the fees would not benefit from their work once it becomes recognized way later in their life? that sound pretty bad.

pickingdinner• 3 years ago

That won't work, because most copyrighted material is worthless, and we can't predict what retains value in the long run, and most don't. Mickey is a rare example of value surviving to the point it was worth (in dollars) protecting.

That's why I prefer a flat tax.

15% goes to the copyright/patent distribution system. Anyone can copy and profit off anything, but just pays 15% into the system.

The system then pays out based on the rules and registration information.

Public domain is then redefined as whatever is tax free.

And, you can also buy anything directly from the government.

Prices are determined by market value if it's a physical product. For digital goods, some rules may have to be defined, and maybe rules to define rules defined. Copies of songs could all just be 25 cents, etc. Books 2.99. But this is to own a copy (defined as having a copy on your system plus having paid for it). Just listening to a copy could be free.

At least this is the direction I wish the world were headed.

LeFantome• 3 years ago

You do not need to charge that much. If nobody is monetizing it, nobody is going to maintain the copyright. Patents work similarly.

Monetization does not need to happen every year though. Think Disney vault and how they would keep classic movies out of distribution intentionally to keep them valuable. This complicates the “legally available” test somewhat. Charging a nominal fee to maintain copyright is a good test though. It makes sure that “somebody” still considers themselves the owner and makes sure they care more than zero.

bogantech2• 3 years ago

If someone creates something and decides not to sell it that is their right. You don't have a divine right to other peoples belongings.

f001• 3 years ago

Absolutely. But that person also does not have a divine right to prevent someone else from copying and selling/distributing it either. Especially when doing so does not deprive the original creator of anything unlike physically stealing something.

philwelch• 3 years ago

I’ve long favored a copyright abandonment law where refusing or failing to make a work available voids the copyright.

I also think this should apply to derived works. For instance, if a film or a book is changed and only sold in the edited form, this should void the copyright on the original version.

bogwog• 3 years ago

It does provide some much-needed to protections for rights holders, but it provides very little protection for consumers. Fair use is something at least, but doesn’t help when rights holders engage in predatory practices that only serve to harm consumers (e.g. the hell that is video streaming today)

Idk what a better copyright law would look like, but I do know that we can do better, and believe it can be done in a way that benefits everyone fairly.

vel0city3• 3 years ago

If I write in my journal it is copyrighted. I may not wish for you to have a copy of my journal. The law should then require me to let you take a copy of it despite me not wanting you to have it?

lmm4• 3 years ago

Copyright is about whether I can make and distribute copies of something I've legitimately acquired; for private material like a journal it's irrelevant whether it's copyrighted.

tptacek11• 3 years ago

People can choose not to make the product of their work available. We don't have an inalienable right to access other people's creative works.

bakugo2• 3 years ago

People can choose not to make the product of their work available.

And these people have chosen to make it available. If you want to create something and keep it all to yourself, fine, do that, nobody will force you to release it to the public. But once you have released it to the public, you shouldn't be able to take it back.

thaumasiotes• 3 years ago

Copyright, as originally envisioned, should be a temporary privilege instead of a de facto ghost racket for perpetual extortion.

Copyright as originally envisioned was a way of preventing books from being published if the crown didn't approve of them.

JoeAltmaier2• 3 years ago

Huh. If I own a Picasso and it's not for sale, then you should be able to take it? Strange argument on the face of it.

tail_exchange• 3 years ago

The supply of Picassos are limited, since there is only one of each piece. Software and other digital medias don't have this constraint.

rvba• 3 years ago

welcome to IPpreservationshop.com where you can buy a copy of our game for 20 million dollars

Of course no-one will do, but we can claim that the game is available legally

lmm4• 3 years ago

My imaginary approach is that you'd have to submit an actual copy to the Library of Congress or equivalent every year / every 5 years / .... So it forces you to at least track what you're copyrighting and have a working "production line". You could still refuse to sell it to anyone, but that would be essentially pique.

rewgs• 3 years ago

I think that makes complete sense. After all, something similar already happens with trademarks: if you don't use it, it lapses. Presumably companies only invest time and money on using the trademarks they expect to yield a return on that investment; if they aren't making money off of it, why should they get to keep others from doing so?

soligern• 3 years ago

There would just be loopholes that can’t realistically be closed. Like they sell only physical copies out of one location in a rural place that is basically inaccessible. I’m also not for forcing people/companies to maintain an online marketplace of their goods.

chrismcb2• 3 years ago

Well it is a "temporary" privilege. It is just that "temporary"timeline is longer than the life of an average human. I disagree with the assertion that if it isn't legally available... But I do agree that copyright is too long

philowe2001• 3 years ago

Old content can compete with new content, causing publishers to lose money. I'm not saying copyright law is good in the form that it exists today, but just because old content does not make money means that old content being available can't lose them money.

neilv2• 3 years ago

All the emulators, etc., work has had its merits, both for cultural preservation effects and for the hacker-y craft achievement, but...

Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices.

Now I suspect most of the nostalgia/familiarity demand is satisfied, and won't return even if you were able to delete every existing emulator, unlicensed ROM image and AV assets, etc.

the_af3• 3 years ago

"Business-wise, had that bootleg environment not happened, I suspect someone could've made a killing by re-releasing vintage games on current devices."

In many cases, the "legal re-release" is leveraging the technology that was used to emulated the games in "less than legal" situations. For example, GOG wraps DOS games with DOSBox, which is how we in the (illegal) abandonware community used to run them anyway.

Another thing to consider: back in the 2000's or so when I discovered abandonware, almost nobody was legally wrapping the games I wanted to play. I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest. So the illegal abandonware way was the right way for me. Who cares what would eventually happen 10 or 20 years later? I wanted to play the games then.

neilv2• 3 years ago

I wanted to play them back then; now I have no interest.

IIUC, you're saying that a commercial effort couldn't/didn't offer the vintage games at the time that you wanted to play them, and now you no longer want to play them?

You're also saying that, although you played the games then (with abandonware), the reason you no longer want to play the games now isn't because the abandonware satisfied the desire?

(You think the nostalgia was time-limited, or something else changed for you? Is this generalizable to the rest of the market for vintage games?)

JKCalhoun2• 3 years ago

I disagree. Getting MAME running with the ROM you are interested in on modern, consumer hardware might be easy for you and me but I suspect the majority of your target audience for retro games do not know how.

There was always a market there, it just wasn't big enough for the copyright holders to want to bother with.

Eumenes• 3 years ago

This prompted me to find out that MediEvil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediEvil) has a remaster ... nostalgia incoming

segphault• 3 years ago

It's bizarre that companies aren't just selling the roms for classic arcade games that are otherwise completely unmonetized. There's an audience that would happily pay money just to be able to legally do what they are already doing with emulators and homemade arcade cabinets.

BashiBazouk• 3 years ago

Probably because 76% of them sucked. Well, maybe that's a bit strong but having lived through most the history of video games, a lot of mediocrity out there. From a preservation and historical standpoint I could see this as a problem but as a large store of video games that most people would want to play, not so much.

devinjon• 3 years ago

Mediocrity aside, I generally prefer pre Y2K games to their contemporary brethren. Maybe I'm in a tiny minority, though.

cubefox4• 3 years ago

If it is any consolation, it seems morally, if not legally, permissible to pirate unavailable classic games.

mustacheemperor2• 3 years ago

Just last weekend I wanted to play Cryostasis after seeing a playthrough on YouTube. It's a pretty unique mid 00s shooter that is relatively light on the shooting and heavy on atmosphere - you're a researcher meeting an icebreaker to leave Antarctica in 1981, but when you find the ship it's been wrecked since 1968, and the game follows you unraveling the mystery using supernatural time-jump powers. Instead of a health bar, you have to keep your body temperature high enough. It's a genuinely unique title that approaches the genre differently from pretty much any other...and it's literally impossible to buy.

It's been delisted from Steam, Good Old Games, and any other storefront I could find online. People resell genuine retail keys that can get the game activated on Steam for ridiculous sums. Reposted hearsay online is that the original source code is lost so there will never be a remaster. There's a copy up on Archive.org, and without it from what I can tell this title would just be lost to time.

There's so many cool, weird, obscure games from the 90s and 00s and its their weirdness and obscurity that puts them most at risk for disappearing and becoming unattainable.

TheRealDunkirk• 3 years ago

My go-to example of game that are "lost" is No One Lives Forever and its sequel. In this case, though, I don't know about the source. All I know is that studio M&A have rendered these titles to be in eternal copyright limbo.

mustacheemperor2• 3 years ago

Definitely great examples. Those games are fantastic, so unique, so full of heart, and just gone.

Solvency• 3 years ago

I mean, there's a point where the blame lies on every single developer and business person involved with these projects.

You don't pour years of manpower and creativity into a game like this and then .... not even save a single .ZIP file to your personal HD.

It just casts such a nihilistic ephemeral shadow on all of this.

lolinder• 3 years ago

There's definitely a mindset thing going on here.

It reminds me of how old television shows (like Doctor Who) are often missing good chunks of the early runs because they recorded over the tapes. Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again.

I can imagine something similar happening with video games—they put in the work, shipped the product, and didn't think what they had done was important enough to preserve for posterity, because who actually thinks that about their own work?

scheeseman4865• 3 years ago

Ran into the same problem with Asobo Studio's Fuel, which got yanked off the market only a few short years after it's release. Had to install a shonky repacked version from IA and apply a bunch of fan patches to it.

It's a good game and historically important too, being a technical progenitor to modern MS Flight Simulator 2020. It sucks that it's become so buried.

DangerousYams3• 3 years ago

THIS is what NFTs should be designed to solve, instead of whatever it is they have actually become.

shmde• 3 years ago

How do people jam NFTs in the most random of places.

Global Warming ?

NFT.

Inflation ?

NFT

anthk5• 3 years ago

NFT, Web3... stop the snake oil, please.

Retroemulation people have been preserving the classics since decades, even more with libre (FLOSS) implementations made with SDL/SDL2 making these games ultraportable and eternal.

What does your lovely NFT solve here? Explain.

DangerousYams3• 3 years ago

Not my lovely NFT at all. Imagine the retro game and emulation required to run it forever preserved in a standard format. That's what a concept like NFT SHOULD be addressing. I'm lamenting that it's not doing so.

DangerousYams3• 3 years ago

jeez guys, please read before dumping on me :) I'm saying ideally, NFTs SHOULD prevent obsolescence of digital assets They don't. But if you think about it, it ought to be one of the primary purposes of a concept like NFT, right? That's all I'm saying. Sorry to use the trigger word :P

ghusto2• 3 years ago

This is why piracy is nearly always the best option.

Want to play the original Tomb Raider? Well it's for sale, in many stores, and for many platforms. Trouble is they're all glitchy. Meanwhile, download a PS1 emulator and the ISO, and it works perfectly.

Saw something on Netflix a while ago that you're only now getting round to have time for? Woosh, it's gone. Meanwhile, download it from BitTorrent and it's yours forever, no internet needed. Same with Spotify and songs.

Pay for things legally, get treated like crap. The piracy option is just a better experience.

gochi• 3 years ago

These fixes were not available in the original. What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation.

For most people this is ok, but when we're talking about preservation it's the ability to play the game as it existed at that time with no barriers, and not something upscaled to 4k with widescreen patches and framerate changes to make it feel like a modern game with blocky aesthetics.

skyyler• 3 years ago

What you are experiencing is altered and is not at all what people are talking about when it comes to preservation.

People are making cycle-accurate emulators for exactly this purpose! Not all emulation is focused on "enhancements"

ghusto2• 3 years ago

I'm not talking about fixes or alterations. I'm talking about running an exact copy of the ROM, to play exactly as it did on the console it was released for.

Unintended emulation inaccuracies are a different matter, but (1) they are addressed with 1:1 hardware emulation (if you so wish), (2) where you don't want that (for the sake of speed, say) the fixes are only there to make the game run as it did anyway

megmogandog• 3 years ago

The problem being that availability is a function of popularity and age. If you want something older that isn't a celebrated classic, it can be a lot more difficult to access...

toastercat• 3 years ago

In some piracy circles and torrent trackers, sharing rare/obscure titles is a way of gaining rep, so at least there, there is incentive in finding and distributing the un-celebrated classics.

szatkus• 3 years ago

But that's rarely a case. There are people maintain huge packages with thousands of old games. I can only think about maybe one or two titles that I couldn't find on the internet after some search. Besides, if a game is really obscure, chances for a legal release are close to zero.

nunez• 3 years ago

Yeah, I agree.

If you didn't buy the original copy of something from 20 years ago and can't get it from eBay, you're SOL in most cases.

Lots of punk albums from small bands made in the 00s fall into this trap.

If you do find it, it's unlikely to be the original mix and might sound louder/have some content missing.

kleiba• 3 years ago

Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it.

Well, maybe not for "Titanic" but there are tons of movies for which the process is pretty much exactly like that.

Video games as a broadly consumed medium are a relatively young feature - let's say some 40 to 50 years. Now, try to easily access most films from the first 40-50 years of cinema!

And even for newer films, if it wasn't for streaming, you would find yourself in the situation that you either watch your favorite movies on outdated technology, or that you have to keep on rebuying the same movies over and over again. And even streaming services provide a fraction what e.g. the original Netflix DVD rental had to offer.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

Abyss, also by James Cameron, is in this state.

Not in print.

firebirdn99• 3 years ago

Another thing I noticed lately is a lot of iPhone games that were built in the early days like 2008 to 2014 and beyond even, get removed from the app store once the developer cannot maintain enough resources to update the code to the latest iOS version. I tried downloading a lot of games I fell in love with with in the early days of the app store but cannot. This is sad too.

reaperducer3• 3 years ago

Aurora Feint

I Love Katamari

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

Oh man Aurora Feint. Who knew they'd go on to make Discord

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

What?

lucb1e3• 3 years ago

I was surprised nobody cared when Google announced they'd be pulling every app from their repository that hasn't been updated in, what was it, 2 years or so?

Things that are functional and complete don't need updating. Why require a subscription model rather than a finished product in a frozen state?

From f-droid I have a few apps that were last updated 11 years ago or something, works just fine. Just tried to find an example, e.g. pizza cost calculator is an app mostly for amusement that had its last real update in 2015 (then in 2021 and 2022 there were updates to support more recent android versions) but I used it literally two hours ago and found that the smaller pizza is cheaper per cm². On my previous phone (2018--2021) I used a 'share to clipboard' app from f-droid, which installs itself as a sharing target. It only ever released v1.0.0 in 2011. Super simple functionality that indeed doesn't need updating; would still use it today if my new phone didn't have that built in. Google would have removed that from their store a decade ago.

tiku• 3 years ago

"marketplace". Ah ok. Good thing they are all preserved on the torrent network then.

agentultra• 3 years ago

The ESA's main thrust is incredibly stupid. What if we decide to re-license that content but everyone can already get it for free from the library? Think of our profit losses!

That hasn't stopped book publishers from publishing the classics over and over.

Preservation is super important. Just look at the Shoah Foundation's effort at preserving the video testimonies of survivors: preservation of digital media is complex, difficult and ever-evolving. Preserving video games is even harder: emulators that run on an ever-evolving set of target hardware have to be maintained just to play them. Current trends in video game design almost guarantee that some games are impossible to preserve: they exist as a moment in time, a memory, the articles and blog posts that were written about them.

Shame really that profit is more important than the art and medium. Not surprising. But shameful.

Update: fixed some sentences for clarity.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

Article reminded me that Phil Spencer from Microsoft Gaming about two years ago did advocate for legal emulation[1] to preserve games. He seemed to be pretty passionate about it, does anyone know if they're still pursuing this or lobbying for it? Microsoft got to have at least some weight.

[1]https://www.axios.com/2021/11/17/microsoft-old-games-preserv...

penjelly• 3 years ago

this is why emulation should be allowed forever

tb_technical• 3 years ago

This is unironically why emulation is a necessary and moral good. We need to preserve these pieces of software so that future generations can enjoy them, if they wish.

andrewmcwatters• 3 years ago

You can’t expect to hold on to stuff through the decades, but I do miss my old consoles and sometimes I wish I still had one or two them to experience playing a game on the original hardware versus an emulator.

smokel• 3 years ago

A painful example in this context is the Philips P2000T home computer.

It was hugely popular in The Netherlands in the early 1980s, but not so much in other countries. Because the market was so small, there were nearly no commercial games. Almost all games for it were written by hobbyists, and were copied freely, using Mini-Cassette tapes.

I have been working on an emulator for it, but it seems near impossible to redistribute the original games. Most of the games do not have a copyright message, and it is often not clear who the original author was. Ironically, these games were _meant_ to be copied, but as of 1993 this is now prohibited by law, and (as far as I understand it) I can only make copies for my own use.

Note that there is a GitHub repository [1] that preserves a lot of games and information about the machine, but I wonder if this is even legal?

(An even bigger problem I face is redistribution of the P2305 Basic Interpreter ROM, which is copyrighted by both Philips and Microsoft. If anyone at Microsoft is reading this -- could you please assist me in getting a license to reverse engineer and ship the original Basic ROM with my emulator?)

[1] https://github.com/p2000t

unsungNovelty• 3 years ago

There is https://www.myabandonware.com and http://www.abandonia.com/en/game/. It's been a while since I have used abandonia. But I use myabandonware.com regularly. It is not perfect I suppose, but I get most of my childhood favourites here.

Croc 2 - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/croc-2-cj0. The only 3D colour videogame we had in our school's computer lab.

Claw - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/claw-a39

The thing - https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-thing-bfm

farawayzone00192• 3 years ago

Wait until they figure out that modern day games are constantly evolving and changing so the concept of "unavailable" exists today for stuff that's less than a year old. Maps, in-game content, in-game characters, etc. It's all short-lived and hardly static.

drivingmenuts• 3 years ago

How many of those games will actually run on modern hardware?

And at what point do we tell the authors to fuck off - they’re not getting paid any more! Because that is what you are advocating.

srlowe• 3 years ago

It's like this with so much media, it drives me crazy. For instance, in the country I'm currently in there is no way to legally watch a lot of movies - not because of censorship or anything, they are simply not distributed, even on google-play, amazon etc. No choice but it use torrent. Why?

cush3• 3 years ago

The opening thesis of the article is very misleading - that endangered video games would be like Titanic only being available in the library of congress.

Titanic was a blockbuster released in 1997, so it would be like Final Fantasy VII only being available at library of congress, which it isn’t. In fact FFVII is continuously being rereleased on modern consoles

wiz21c• 3 years ago

Many movies are locked the same way because their owner think they're not worth publishing again and after all, it's their stuff, they do/don't do whatever they want with it.

It'd be so much better if copyright was limited for say, 30 years. So that you could pay when you're young and get it for free when you're old... So you'd pay for novelty, not for content. Dunno...

cush3• 3 years ago

One thing not mentioned in the article or comments here is how open source enriches the historical significance of a piece of software. No game will stand the test of time like Doom has, thanks to its source being available (and of course, elegant).

johncessna• 3 years ago

I really wish the study matched the headline. It should be 'most classic video games are commercially unavailable' To their credit, they don't try to hide it, but the sentiment in the headline is the actual problem, in my mind.

I'm less concerned about a gameboy game that you can't buy, but you can easily play via emulators or the physical cartridges, which still exist (for now), than I am with the class of games that are truly gone/unplayable.

Your online only games primarily fall into this bag, but without something like an internet archive or something similar to preserve them, we're in danger of losing the digital copies of old games as well.

Personally, I'd like to see the study expanded and then some sort of index that tracks true loss of media over time.

crtified• 3 years ago

It may also be pertinent to note that it's an entirely USA-centric article and study. A distinction the article makes in it's first paragraph: "87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered".

Not to unduly belittle that metric! - nobody would argue that the USA is not a major player (the biggest, in some respects) - but it's still a significant distinction. The articles nuance of copyright laws, and its figures, and its proposed activism, are all specific to that one national jurisdiction.

baerrie• 3 years ago

Piracy to the rescue! The companies with the endangered IP should make a deal to forgive key piracy hubs in exchange for archiving their games into perpetuity. Earthbound is a great example of an incredibly influential game that is very expensive in its original form but widely available illegally, having inspired multiple generations of game developers that played it this way that otherwise would not have. How can we simply call this “theft”?

pkaye• 3 years ago

How have other countries (Japan, EU countries) handled this issue of preserving access to classic video games?

padobson• 3 years ago

25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time.

Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.

The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.

All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.

Edit: I got curious again and did some investigating. Here's their archived home page from 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970707215116/http://www.2am.co...

coreyp_1• 3 years ago

This is a thorny subject.

Copyrite is, by definition, the control of the rights to copy. It is not a mandate that copying must be done, but rather an acknowledgement of the right to control the copies. And that must also, then, include the right to not distribute the work.

This must be balanced with the notion of fair use, though. However, "but I want to access it" does not justify fair use. "I bought a copy and therefore will make backups so that I may enjoy it in the future" does, in my opinion.

Libraries have exceptions codified in copyrite law. Technology has blurred the line as to what constitutes a library (just as it has for journalists, publishers, etc.).

Some advocate for an escalating fee in order to protect copyrite for more and more time. I don't know if that is appropriate, since it seems to me as a form of extortion of rights. Not quite compelled speech, but similar.

I don't know the solution, but I do feel as though our laws are broken and dysfunctional in this regard. I don't have a solution, though, because I honestly don't know enough of the problem domain. Then again, maybe that's the problem... One should not need to be a legal expert in order to keep from breaking the law!

miga• 3 years ago

Last call for preservation of our video game history.

Right to preserve our culture should be enshrined in law, because otherwise it will disappear due to adverse relation with copyright law and novel art production.

phkahler• 3 years ago

Ever drive a model T? Can you find a 64 Mustang convertible? 1800s vintage tea cups?

Lots of old things are scarce. Arcade games are in the same boat, but you've got MAME and I've got a bit-slice coprocessor and rasterizer ASIC controlled by a 6809 in I,Robot.

Not sure how games are different from other antiques other than the possibility of emulation.

terlisimo• 3 years ago

The main difference is that creating a 100% perfect copy of a game costs next to nothing, and creating a new 100% perfect copy of model T is almost impossible, even if you have one to copy it from.

bbstats• 3 years ago

This remains to be true of the Star Wars trilogy...

cvccvroomvroom• 3 years ago

I love my greaseweazle. Piracy, eBay trawling, and disassembler cracking make things usable.

New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable

Related Stories