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News Report: 87% of all video games released prior to 2010 are no longer commercially available. (up: the ESA is fighting VGHF over this study)

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Krvavi Abadas

Krvavi Abadas

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  • 87% of classic games are not in release, and are considered critically endangered
  • Availability is low across every platform and time period tracked in the study
  • Libraries and archives can digitally preserve, but not digitally share video games, and can provide on-premises access only
  • Libraries and archives are allowed to digitally share other media types, such as books, film, and audio, and are not restricted to on-premises access
  • The Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry’s lobbying group, has consistently fought against expanding video game preservation within libraries and archives
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a genuinely dire situation being reported here. especially compared to other industries.
as Frank Cifaldi noted in a GDC talk (the same one that falsely claimed Nintendo "downloaded roms off the internet" for Virtual Console, but please keep in mind that's just a minor mistake which overshadowed the rest of it.) several years ago. films don't require the same amount of attention to bring over to other platforms. just a simple video file is enough.
but games require a large amount of reprogramming to get ported over, even if you're merely using emulation.

as noted, unofficial means have always been an option. but you're generally losing out on important historical context which isn't always going to leave the development studio and end up in the hands of researchers. unreleased revisions, concept art, and direct discussions from the original developers.
a blend of both choices will always be the ideal path forward when it comes to preserving gaming history.
 
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yeah there is just not as much financial incentive to keep a backlog of old games compared to movies. games are much, much more complex

also anyone else notice that the chart looks like pacman
 
Tangerine_Cookie said:
I was reading that earlier and it feels wild to me that with all the avenues for rereleasing content we have available nowadays, only such a small percentage of total games is actually available legally.
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There's a large variety of reasons, as well, from companies going bankrupt and rights falling into a metaphorical void, to publishers just having no incentive to re-release many of their older games commercially, to some games just being better off unavailable COUGHTime TwistCOUGH.

And then there are the examples that are noteworthy for how insane they are, like Tommy Tallarico literally buying Intellivision and all of its associated game IPs, and then running it into the ground.
 
That's actually higher than I thought. Consider ALL of the games that were released before 2010, not just well known titles. All those Wii shovelware games. All those forgotten PS2 games. All of those licensed games. For many reasons, mostly financial and licensing, these will never be re-released. That's why those mediocre games that show on NSO are important as well. Nintendo will release A Link to the Past over and over again. But those lesser known titles from third parties are most endanger of becoming unplayable in the future.
 
Internet Archive actually maintains some of the best romsets available (including WiiU), and is made available for scholarship and research purposes only.

I don't speak for others, but I 100% support academic/scholarly/non-commercial efforts to preserve games that the IP owners neglect, and applaud the efforts of government/not-for-profit institutions around the world doing their part.

Every living being has a duty of care to preserve the past for future generations.
 
This is disconcerting and unfortunate. While there’s a ton of shovelware, there are also a ton of hidden gems that have languished on old hardware for decades. Some of these games:
  1. Are extremely difficult to get on the second-hand market.
  2. Were never released commercially outside of Japan (or other country of origin).
  3. Shipped on special cartridges.
Regarding #3, there are ROM hacks to get around some of the functionality like the sun sensor in the Boktai series, but that takes a lot away from the intended experience.

It’s sad that a lot of people’s hard work is in danger of being lost and/or forgotten.
 
I assume most of these are utter trash

I bet there's a similar stat for books and films

Edit - Since I know people feel strongly the other way, I will elaborate a bit. I don't think every game needs to be preserved, it's ok for things to be forgotten, and I don't believe in putting energy into preserving things that people didn't care for at the time. Some things are ephemeral and that's ok. There are definitely some brilliant games not available today, and that is a shame. But it isn't 87% of them, probably nowhere near.
 
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Fun fact: Square Enix still sells new copies of some of their older in-house games on their site. (USA)
na.store.square-enix-games.com

Video Games

na.store.square-enix-games.com na.store.square-enix-games.com

You can still buy Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X, FFX-2, and FFXII brand new for the PS2!


This is incredibly important since Kingdom Hearts (PS2) is the only version of the game that has functional controls.
 
kaya bunji said:
Internet Archive actually maintains some of the best romsets available (including WiiU), and is made available for scholarship and research purposes only.

I don't speak for others, but I 100% support academic/scholarly/non-commercial efforts to preserve games that the IP owners neglect, and applaud the efforts of government/not-for-profit institutions around the world doing their part.

Every living being has a duty of care to preserve the past for future generations.
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Let’s not kid ourselves. Internet Archive is the world’s biggest piracy website and that is by design. It’s actually shocking that the major publishers haven’t done anything to curtail it yet, and I suspect that the current Wild West free access nature of its ROM archives won’t remain so easily publicly available for long.
 
Narroo said:
Fun fact: Square Enix still sells new copies of some of their older in-house games on their site. (USA)
na.store.square-enix-games.com

Video Games

na.store.square-enix-games.com na.store.square-enix-games.com

You can still buy Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy X, FFX-2, and FFXII brand new for the PS2!


This is incredibly important since Kingdom Hearts (PS2) is the only version of the game that has functional controls.
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Ehh…can you elaborate?
 
Not surprised to be honest. Preservation and restoration have been pretty recent things. A lot of companies just didn't care back in the day.

However, despite many games not being viable for future rereleases (often due to licensing), strides have been made to bring classic titles to modern platforms.
 
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Catsylvania said:
This is disconcerting and unfortunate. While there’s a ton of shovelware, there are also a ton of hidden gems that have languished on old hardware for decades. Some of these games:
  1. Are extremely difficult to get on the second-hand market.
  2. Were never released commercially outside of Japan (or other country of origin).
  3. Shipped on special cartridges.
Regarding #3, there are ROM hacks to get around some of the functionality like the sun sensor in the Boktai series, but that takes a lot away from the intended experience.

It’s sad that a lot of people’s hard work is in danger of being lost and/or forgotten.
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I'm happy romhacks for stuff like Boktai's light sensor and WarioWare Twisted gyro scope exist. While it's not the "true" experience, it's close enough and keeps the game from being permanently unplayable/lost. You could argue even for other forms of media like film or books that the modern versions we have are not the original "as intended" way to experience them either.
 
neil said:
I assume most of these are utter trash

I bet there's a similar stat for books and films
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This is a pretty shitty assumption to make (and the part about books and films is almost certainly not true, given the work of preservationists which are not as actively hindered as their counterparts in gaming are)
Dcubed said:
Let’s not kid ourselves. Internet Archive is the world’s biggest piracy website and that is by design.
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Do you know what the Internet Archive is
 
The Internet Archive is many things... but then as a user you can upload stuff yourself there. I'll let you guess the many forms of how that is used by the users.
 
hologram said:
The part about books and films is almost certainly not true, given the work of preservationists which are not as actively hindered as their counterparts in gaming are
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According to IMDb around 2,500 movies are made each year. I can think of a few good ones that I've heard of that aren't available, but there are thousands more that simply disappear after making no impact at all.

Books? Around 1 million are published each year, by actual publishers according to this WordsRated article - the number doesn't even include all the self-published books. Most will go out of print very quickly, never to be seen again.
 
Is downloading content from internet archive that you don't own piracy? Sure

Should you feel bad about downloading a game that isn't legally available anywhere anymore so that you can experience it? Not at all, just don't flaunt it.

Also lets be real, when you look at any rom site/set, a good % of the most downloaded games do fall into that 13%. Just using a random rom site I looked at for SNES roms and looking at the most popular, out of 23 games (front page has 24, but I'm removing the romhack)

10/23 are on NSO
1/23 is getting a remake soon (mario rpg)
5/23 are available in other collections

The remaining 7 consist of

2 Mortal Kombat games (which is surprising that there is currently no official way to buy the classic MK games on modern devices)

1 BS Mario title, though we do have the all star version of Mario 3 on NSO, but the BS remix features aren't available

A konami soccer game, the Japanese only Bomberman 5, Goof Troop (I'm pretty sire this hasn't been in any of the capcom collections), and Top Gear.

Ideally they should all be available, but most people aren't downloading games they can't easily obtain legally, they're downloading popular stuff "for free".
 
The mentions of shovelware and "bad games" point to a larger issue about preservation, curation and how those two areas intersect. It's also worth looking at availability in a broader sense here and how limited releases, the lack of localizations, licenses running out or convoluted rights situations contribute to this issue.

Comparisons to movies or literature are difficult for a plethora of reasons but I generally think that companies (i.e. the rights holders) shouldn't be the sole arbiters of what pieces of art should be made available to a larger public, mostly because they are usually motivated by commercial concerns rather than cultural ones. One could make the argument that the cream always rises to the top but companies, critics and even audiences constantly get stuff like this wrong. Take Starship Troopers being completely misunderstood when it originally released. Should the work of Roger Corman or Albert Pyun disappear in the void because it's "trash"? Or imagine missing out on movies like The Thing or Vertigo because Universal and Paramount decided that their commercial and critical reception at release meant that those movies should be buried.

Obviously, I don't think that Ninjabread Man is secretly a masterpiece on the level of Friedkin's Sorcerer but it should be possible for games to be reevaluated after their release and for a large number of fantastic, influential or culturally relevant games that is only possible thanks to the efforts of fantranslators, emulator devs and pirates. Libraries won't and can't solve all of the issues but giving them the protection to allow preservation where companies fail to provide any legal option would help a lot.
 
BassForever said:
I'm happy romhacks for stuff like Boktai's light sensor and WarioWare Twisted gyro scope exist. While it's not the "true" experience, it's close enough and keeps the game from being permanently unplayable/lost. You could argue even for other forms of media like film or books that the modern versions we have are not the original "as intended" way to experience them either.
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I agree. I’m a huge proponent for ROM hacks particularly for games that wouldn’t be accessible for people, including myself, otherwise (i.e. translation patches). I simply meant that there is still something lost for games on special cartridges that merely downloading a ROM can’t replicate. The solar sensor was the Boktai series’ main hook which to me is a step beyond say a book sold today that was originally serialized in like the New Yorker or something.

BassForever said:
Is downloading content from internet archive that you don't own piracy? Sure

Should you feel bad about downloading a game that isn't legally available anywhere anymore so that you can experience it? Not at all, just don't flaunt it.
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I agree with this as well in principle. However, Mother 3 was my barometer. I kept telling myself I’d download the ROM if Nintendo wouldn’t bring the game over itself. I still felt bad and bought the cartridge anyway (even though Nintendo doesn’t get any of that money) so I could dump the ROM myself and install the translation patch. 🤦‍♀️

Despite really disliking Limited Run Games’ business practices, I still buy its Game Boy releases to have a legal copy. For many of the games I still want to play that fall in that 87%, I’m probably going to have to deal with the guilt.
 
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I think as I get older this shit bothers me more. I think it's actually insane how hard it is to get older games. If I want to watch an older movie, there are numerous options depending on the movie. But you most likely can buy/rent it. Same thing with music and tv shows(although the latter is a little rougher). I get why this is from a basic technological standpoint but this industry does need to catch up to pretty much every other entertainment industry.
 
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It's more work then with music and film, and rights are always a problem. Not surprised.
While porting movies or music to another platform to be playable is essentially free (assuming a digital version exists), with games it's different
 
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Hailinel said:
...What?
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The HD version of KH1 revamped the controls, and they did an incredibly incompetent job at it. For example, the R-stick camera is mapped to four digital buttons: Up-down-left and right, which results in an single-speed 8-direction camera with a square root of two error on the diagonals There's also virtually no dead zones for the R stick, or for the detection of the diagonals. As a result, simply brushing the R-stick in KH1 will make the camera swing wildly out of control, making the simple platform challenges in KH1 frustratingly difficult. (Case in point, the foot race. The footrace in KH1 is supposed to be extremely easy, but it's rather difficult in the HD version due to the control changes.)

Also, the lock-on feature is nearly useless in the HD version, because switch targets is now stuck to the R-stick.

I could make an entire topic about this...if I had the time and energy,


The short of it is: The original KH1 was a pathological action-RPG with it's weird turn-based menu inspired interface. To compensate, they made a really weird control scheme for the original PS2. It was unintuitive, but it did work very well if you were willing to learn it. The entire game, including the level design, was designed around these controls. The HD versions tried to back-port conventional controls due to "demand" (some people have strokes if they have to play action games with anything but the 'standard' control scheme). But, the HD ports are just ROM-hacks, so they couldn't backport in real R-stick camera controls, and so it was a disaster that no one talks about.
 
Narroo said:
The HD version of KH1 revamped the controls, and they did an incredibly incompetent job at it. For example, the R-stick camera is mapped to four digital buttons: Up-down-left and right, which results in an single-speed 8-direction camera with a square root of two error on the diagonals There's also virtually no dead zones for the R stick, or for the detection of the diagonals. As a result, simply brushing the R-stick in KH1 will make the camera swing wildly out of control, making the simple platform challenges in KH1 frustratingly difficult. (Case in point, the foot race. The footrace in KH1 is supposed to be extremely easy, but it's rather difficult in the HD version due to the control changes.)

Also, the lock-on feature is nearly useless in the HD version, because switch targets is now stuck to the R-stick.

I could make an entire topic about this...if I had the time and energy,


The short of it is: The original KH1 was a pathological action-RPG with it's weird turn-based menu inspired interface. To compensate, they made a really weird control scheme for the original PS2. It was unintuitive, but it did work very well if you were willing to learn it. The entire game, including the level design, was designed around these controls. The HD versions tried to back-port conventional controls due to "demand" (some people have strokes if they have to play action games with anything but the 'standard' control scheme). But, the HD ports are just ROM-hacks, so they couldn't backport in real R-stick camera controls, and so it was a disaster that no one talks about.
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I mean I played at least part of both the original and the HD version of KH1, and while there were obvious limitations and compromises in how the controls could be changed given the method of the remaster, this is blowing things wildly out of proportion.
 
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"NOOOOOOOOO WHY DID I DOWNLOAD THOSE 40 YEAR OLD NES ROMS MIYAMOTO IM SORRY AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
5qjizx.png
 
Narroo said:
The HD version of KH1 revamped the controls, and they did an incredibly incompetent job at it. For example, the R-stick camera is mapped to four digital buttons: Up-down-left and right, which results in an single-speed 8-direction camera with a square root of two error on the diagonals There's also virtually no dead zones for the R stick, or for the detection of the diagonals. As a result, simply brushing the R-stick in KH1 will make the camera swing wildly out of control, making the simple platform challenges in KH1 frustratingly difficult. (Case in point, the foot race. The footrace in KH1 is supposed to be extremely easy, but it's rather difficult in the HD version due to the control changes.)

Also, the lock-on feature is nearly useless in the HD version, because switch targets is now stuck to the R-stick.

I could make an entire topic about this...if I had the time and energy,


The short of it is: The original KH1 was a pathological action-RPG with it's weird turn-based menu inspired interface. To compensate, they made a really weird control scheme for the original PS2. It was unintuitive, but it did work very well if you were willing to learn it. The entire game, including the level design, was designed around these controls. The HD versions tried to back-port conventional controls due to "demand" (some people have strokes if they have to play action games with anything but the 'standard' control scheme). But, the HD ports are just ROM-hacks, so they couldn't backport in real R-stick camera controls, and so it was a disaster that no one talks about.
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I don’t really agree with this post because that race always kicked my ass, but I love it. Thanks for the well thought-out perspective.
 
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I mean legislation is the only way to change this and uhhhhh....well good luck with that
 
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Tentacle-tropes said:
Just think about all those flash games most people didn’t save when flash went defunct. They don’t even account mobile either which has a ton of games that weren’t saved.
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Flash thankfully has been decently preserved thanks to projects like Flashpoint, the fact that the vast majority of games using it were completely free means they doesn't have to deal with the legal challenges described in the article. (though there's still occasionally legal issues, the team got a notice from major Flash game developer Nitrome to remove all of their games from it. which they ended up doing to be safe.)

Mobile games (particularly iOS and Android) is definitely a huge blindspot, though. it's a massive pain to deal with.
Narroo said:
Fun fact: Square Enix still sells new copies of some of their older in-house games on their site. (USA)
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that's actually new old stock Square still has lying around after all these years. opening one up shows it still has the same outdated ads and other such things you'd expect from a copy of the time period.

(in the example in the thumbnail, the manual has ads for the Bradygames guide, a company which merged with Prima Games in 2015 before eventually closing entirely in 2018. alongside the PS2 version of Final Fantasy X-2.)
Hailinel said:
And then there are the examples that are noteworthy for how insane they are, like Tommy Tallarico literally buying Intellivision and all of its associated game IPs, and then running it into the ground.
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i've seen people argue that the Amico "permanently damaged" the Intellivision brand for a while, but i feel they were already struggling before Tommy bought it.
there were plenty of those cheap "flashback" consoles made for the system, and even a iOS collection published by MTV of all companies.
91V2mJSUW8L.jpg

just super commercialized stuff with little effort put into it, a far cry from it's origins of the brand initially getting acquired by a pair of former programmers who just wanted to tell the world their story.
 
neil said:
I assume most of these are utter trash

I bet there's a similar stat for books and films

Edit - Since I know people feel strongly the other way, I will elaborate a bit. I don't think every game needs to be preserved, it's ok for things to be forgotten, and I don't believe in putting energy into preserving things that people didn't care for at the time. Some things are ephemeral and that's ok. There are definitely some brilliant games not available today, and that is a shame. But it isn't 87% of them, probably nowhere near.
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I with the idea that things should be allowed to be forgotten. Things can be ephemeral. That said, I think you're looking at it the wrong way.

Think about the concept of the public domain: For most of history no one "own" a song or a story. Cultures produced various sorts of entertainment and media works. The idea that someone could "own" an intellectual property came out of the 1800's printing revolution, which necessitated the concept of copyright in order to protect media creators from being bankrupted by copiers.

Copyright is important for people to have in order to make a living publishing. But there's a limit to how long a copyright lasts, as there well should be. Society should be able to stock up on entertainment works for itself while also supporting authors. There one day should eventually be a public domain for video games, just as there is for books, movies, and songs. Even if a lot of the games are crap and unimportant. The same goes for movies and music too.

The problem is, is that games are being lost forever well before they can hit the public domain. If a game is to be forgotten, it should be after it hits the public domain, because people don't care about it. Not because of legal technicalities and hardware issues.

Not to say that too much of importance is going to be lost at this point, but it's the principle of the matter.

Also: Brave Fencer Musashi I don't think has EVER gotten a second release, not even as a PS1 classic. And that game TOTALLY deserves to be remembered. It's up there with Megaman Legends for PS1 games. There's a few timeless classics that have somehow slipped through the cracks.
 
Narroo said:
I with the idea that things should be allowed to be forgotten. Things can be ephemeral. That said, I think you're looking at it the wrong way.

Think about the concept of the public domain: For most of history no one "own" a song or a story. Cultures produced various sorts of entertainment and media works. The idea that someone could "own" an intellectual property came out of the 1800's printing revolution, which necessitated the concept of copyright in order to protect media creators from being bankrupted by copiers.

Copyright is important for people to have in order to make a living publishing. But there's a limit to how long a copyright lasts, as there well should be. Society should be able to stock up on entertainment works for itself while also supporting authors. There one day should eventually be a public domain for video games, just as there is for books, movies, and songs. Even if a lot of the games are crap and unimportant. The same goes for movies and music too.

The problem is, is that games are being lost forever well before they can hit the public domain. If a game is to be forgotten, it should be after it hits the public domain, because people don't care about it. Not because of legal technicalities and hardware issues.

Not to say that too much of importance is going to be lost at this point, but it's the principle of the matter.

Also: Brave Fencer Musashi I don't think has EVER gotten a second release, not even as a PS1 classic. And that game TOTALLY deserves to be remembered. It's up there with Megaman Legends for PS1 games. There's a few timeless classics that have somehow slipped through the cracks.
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I agree with you 100% about the principle, copyright, etc.

But who is supposed to put effort into preserving all these games nobody liked in the first place? It costs time and money. For what?

Also, don't you think a lot of those printed works you mentioned got lost before they could enter the public domain? I do.

Let games people found interesting at the time be preserved, and the rest forgotten I say.
 
neil said:
I agree with you 100% about the principle, copyright, etc.

But who is supposed to put effort into preserving all these games nobody liked in the first place? It costs time and money. For what?

Also, don't you think a lot of those printed works you mentioned got lost before they could enter the public domain? I do.

Let games people found interesting at the time be preserved, and the rest forgotten I say.
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I mean, that's kind of the point. Video games don't preserve well naturally, so it raises the question as how to preserve these things given the effort involved. There's nothing wrong with people raising the question.

Also: You underestimate how much some people like archiving things as a hobby. It's like the less talked about little brother of amateur astronomy. If some people want to preserve digital media, let them. There's no reason to tell them to stop and "just let stuff be forgotten."

Also, what do you mean about "games people found interesting at the time?" How do you determine that? By how many times a game's been re-released? Not every game is fortunate enough not to have issues that allow for periodic re-releases on new consoles to sell to people instead of new and original games. Sometimes companies go out of business. Othertimes, there are technical issues. And so on.

Basically, you're just telling people to shut up and stop thinking about something because "things should be forgotten as a principle," which is a rather careless and nihilistic way of looking at things. It's a rather wasteful and consumptive way as well.
 
Narroo said:
I mean, that's kind of the point. Video games don't preserve well naturally, so it raises the question as how to preserve these things given the effort involved. There's nothing wrong with people raising the question.

Also: You underestimate how much some people like archiving things as a hobby. It's like the less talked about little brother of amateur astronomy. If some people want to preserve digital media, let them. There's no reason to tell them to stop and "just let stuff be forgotten."

Also, what do you mean about "games people found interesting at the time?" How do you determine that? By how many times a game's been re-released? Not every game is fortunate enough not to have issues that allow for periodic re-releases on new consoles to sell to people instead of new and original games. Sometimes companies go out of business. Othertimes, there are technical issues. And so on.

Basically, you're just telling people to shut up and stop thinking about something because "things should be forgotten as a principle," which is a rather careless and nihilistic way of looking at things. It's a rather wasteful and consumptive way as well.
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Don't put words in my mouth. I haven't told anyone to shut up. People can spend time archiving whatever they want. I have a game history archiving project myself. My issue is with people attaching some sense of injustice to forgotten games staying forgotten. They argue it's a worthy cause to preserve them all, I disagree. That's all.
 
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Narroo said:
It seem

Go on their webstore. I bought KH1 and Chrono Cross from them a few years ago. They have KH2 at the moment, and a few PS2 FF games. And some random DS games.
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I was referring to the bit about KH1 on PS2 being the only functional version, which you explained elsewhere. I was familiar with Square’s classics being available on their website; I almost bought Chrono Cross on a lark!

Sorry; I should have been more clear in my quoting of your post.
 
neil said:
I assume most of these are utter trash

I bet there's a similar stat for books and films

Edit - Since I know people feel strongly the other way, I will elaborate a bit. I don't think every game needs to be preserved, it's ok for things to be forgotten, and I don't believe in putting energy into preserving things that people didn't care for at the time. Some things are ephemeral and that's ok. There are definitely some brilliant games not available today, and that is a shame. But it isn't 87% of them, probably nowhere near.
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The comparison to books and films doesn’t work here.

Once out of copyright, a book is pretty easy to re-release even if it isn’t available anywhere. All you need is a single old copy of it, someone to scan or type it, some proofreading and editing. Stick a new cover on it and that’s pretty much how ranges of out-of-copyright classic literature with a nice new fresh set of covers work. Even if it is in copyright, a book usually has one single author, the rights aren’t a massive nightmare as finding out who owns them isn’t hard. E-reader stores make it easier than ever to find and buy books as keeping them available is relatively easy- it’s in the interests of publishers for their entire catalogue to be available digitally where possible, they are tiny files that notch up small sales decade after decade.

Films are harder, you obviously can’t remake them from scratch, but even then a single video file is all you need. The licensing is harder given the money involved in original production, but it’s much easier for even an old video file to be converted for modern formats- remastering or even just repackaging old films is not an insignificant portion of the retail/digital film publishing business. Subscription services also mean there’s more available to viewers today than there was when we relied on VHS releases and video rentals, and before that you were limited to broadcast/cinema. It’s comparatively much easier to find some trashy limited-release horror film from decades ago today than it was back then.

Games only ever get harder as converting them to run on new hardware is much more difficult due to the relationship between games and technology. A rendered video file of a film doesn’t care what camera tech it was shot on, and it can be re-rendered easily enough from the masters. Games, not so much, and their rights situations (particularly around any licensed software) only get more complex with time.
 
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i mean, the same (or similar) could be said of games before the year 2000, probably.

the games industry, in the grand scheme of things, is still in its infancy. and yet it is probably the fastest moving genre of art that has ever existed. 'preservation', IMO, is more important as a concept than a practice. regardless of how hard we work to preserve every little nook and cranny of this industry, this era of games will one day become victim to the rising tides of history where only the highest peaks remain. these days i fully agree with @neil; not everything has to be preserved. the last 10-20 years of games history are filled with a lot of excellent titles, and some will unfortunately be lost to time earlier than others. but the bulk of that 87% volume is likely not worth remembering.
 
Bad games deserve to be remembered and preserved as well. Who arbitrarily gets to decide what is considered "worth preserving/not worth preserving"? Even bad games have a story to tell, I don't mean in the game but how they came to be, and what we can learn from them. Some people even find great enjoyment in playing/watching crap for various reasons.

As a personal example, I'm a big Tales of fan, Tales of the Tempest is wildly considered the worst game in the series. It's so bad it's been demoted and isn't even considered a mainline game like the other DS Tales games. However some mad lad got a team together to fully translate this bad, Japanese only game to English so people like me can play it. Having played it I can confirm, it's really that bad. However it still mattered a lot to me that I was able to play it, and I'm sure as more English gamers become fans of Tales, they'll appreciate having the option to go back and experience the dark horse game.
 
To be honest for a lot of systems with fewer games than like... smartphones, it's doable to preserve everything.
However when there's like 100 games releasing every day, at one point you gotta not bother with the trash.

And by trash, I don't mean bad games, I mean games that bring literally nothing of value (yes, bad games can have value) other than being part of the cesspool of many asset flips or stuff made for gullible people who don't know any better.
 
LuigiBlood said:
To be honest for a lot of systems with fewer games than like... smartphones, it's doable to preserve everything.
However when there's like 100 games releasing every day, at one point you gotta not bother with the trash.

And by trash, I don't mean bad games, I mean games that bring literally nothing of value (yes, bad games can have value) other than being part of the cesspool of many asset flips or stuff made for gullible people who don't know any better.
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I would say the flood of asset flip "games" we see on sites like Steam probably don't need to be preserved because the engine they lazily tried to resell is already preserved. If we get to a point where only "games" like that aren't preserved we'll be in a good spot imo.
 
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all according to keikaku

1. sell new games at $60
2. let them play inifnite backlog they purchased decades ago or at pennies on the dollar
 
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ngpdrew said:
I was referring to the bit about KH1 on PS2 being the only functional version, which you explained elsewhere. I was familiar with Square’s classics being available on their website; I almost bought Chrono Cross on a lark!

Sorry; I should have been more clear in my quoting of your post.
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That's fine.

But really: KH1 (PS2) being the only 'functional' version is a hill I'm willing to die on. Have you seen a comparison of the controls?

PS2 version

img-03-clU3gqnrqg.png



Here's the PS3 version:




Notice a difference?

Now, if I know people on the internet, some of them are going to have a stroke when they see that KH1 (PS2) originally had 'tank controls' for the camera. The R-Stick was a secondary option for selecting commands, meant for avoiding have to do claw grips to while fighting.

But here's the thing: While R-stick cameras are normally the accepted "correct" control scheme for modern action games, that doesn't mean you can just incompetently backport conventional control schemes into old games and have them work.

KH1's levels and enemies were designed around shoulder button cameras, similar to Megaman Legends 1. Also, it was designed around a 4:3 camera, instead of a zoomed-in widescreen.

KH1.5HD's R-stick camera is not a true R-stick camera; they just remaped the should buttons to the R-stick, so it doesn't friggen work correctly. It's still a tank camera, but just much harder to use, and it doesn't function correctly because there's like no dead zone on the vertical directions. So the camera tends to veer wildly into the sky like a druken man falling backwards.

And then people make topics about: "WOW KH1 had really bad controls didn't it? I'm so glad they fixed the controls in later games!"

And it's like: No. People just bitched so hard about shoulder button cameras that SE botched the control scheme. And that somehow made people happy. Because they'd rather have a non-functional 'correct' control scheme over an abnormal control scheme that actually works in the game that was designed around it.
 
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