@@SecretRaginMan Hard to blame content creators accepting some say questionable ad stuff to sustain their show. They are just trying to get by not buying a 3rd house
A shoutout to the folks at Good Old Games who are not only preserving old games by selling you a large collection of older titles, but are also 100% DRM free, so you don't need to worry about the possibility that the servers will go down some day.
In addition, they also tweak the files so that those old games often work pretty well with modern software. GOG is a godsend to anyone that wants to play games while not being tethered to a service like Steam.
@@ThunderingRoarlet us not forget that CDPR, in fact, is basically the original creators of GOG, since bootlegging game copies is how they got into business in the first place.
@@ThunderingRoar Unless I missed a beat somewhere and my memory (and google) is failing me, praising CDPR for publishing on GoG is like giving praise for Portal 2 being released on Steam.
This is funny how this is coming up now. I may or may not have been looking into how to crack my entire steam library so that I can archive everything onto a personal server someday and have everything be accessible DRM-free. It would be really nice to not lose every game I've been buying for 15 years to any unforeseen circumstance.
tbh while I love steam despite it's shortcomings and faults, I look forward and fear what it's going to become once leadership inevitably has to change. We take a lot of it's features for granted and a more profit-minded person (as in "make shittons of money now and burn the place to the ground" levels of profit-minded) can and will take an Elon Musk-branded sledgehammer to the service.
It's not really about whether you need internet access or not. It's about the fact that the overwhelming majority of companies requiring it shut down the game after an indeterminate time, destroying the game and effectively robbing you of your purchase. The thing that doesn't get brought up enough is this practice has not been established as legal, despite the industry making billions from it. It's untested by the courts and for games that are sold as goods, depriving the buyer of it all functionality after the point of sale would be flatly illegal in many other industries.
This level of conversation is the benefit of being slightly older gamers. There's history, knowledge, and the ability to compare to previous generations of content. I fear our younger gamers, not having this info at hand, are the ones really taking the gaming industry into a more disposable territory. So keep doing this sort of thing - for the kids!
I agree the younger gamers attitudes are the problem, but I won't say they are entirely at fault. Us older gamers did all we could to stop DLC, MTX, Day 1 Patches etc from happening, but the companies knew all they needed to do was keep at it until the new impressionable kids with no prior understanding showed up at took everything as they were handed it. The blame lies of the industry... it knew exactly what it was doing.
I definitely think this issue is more to do with the consumers who don't care, no matter the age. The people who are content with most of the annoying business models of the industry. The people who want to buy every single repetitive game in a series, digitally preorder for useless things, and buy DLC that is meant to give the "full experience" instead of looking at other games.
This is why GOG's model (that is, the practice, not the store itself, I'm only slightly shilling for it) must not only be supported, but actively advocated for. It still has the same issue of the distributor deciding to pull merchandise but that applies to any store, physical or digital. GOG gives you the raw game files with zero DRM and it supports numerous older titles going back into the 80s. Preservation of gaming history and true ownership. Objects can be recalled, substances can be pulled, smart devices can be messed with via online updates, but nothing can be done to the full game files sitting in a drive.
No, we need to support a not-for-profit archive model. Relying on what makes a company money is not a good solution for retaining the history of a medium. Putting aside how availability will depend on commercial appeal, squabbles over revived IPs will make things disappear from storefronts, and history will be edited by companies just to preserve their profits.
I like the idea that it codifies his actual awe of video games on occasion. He spends loads of time tearing them to crap because he knows what they can be and he wants that, but this is him saying "The dream is real!"
The Completionist, Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and now Yahtzee each covered game preservation within 24 hours....Good. LRG's is apparently making a new Shantae GBA game....Good. They're also doing Plumbers Don't Wear Ties......Good?
Acting like LRG cares about preservation is laughable, they’re just manipulators of FOMO and the scarcity market working under the guise of the “charity” of publishing digital games, a practice that is utter nonsense when they do releases of games owned by Bethesda and Disney who can damn well publish physical copies themselves.
If only Yahtzee's commenters could make the distinction between fuzzy-headed nostalgia and actual preservation, which I mention in this reply for no reason
The Completionist also covered it in a video a few months ago when he and his crew bought everything from the 3DS store. It was a lot tougher than they thought.
I'm an old man whose shaken his fist at his share of clouds, but I've been banging this drum of decades. I spent countless hours playing Neverwinter Nights on AOL (although the phone company certainly was counting those hours). Needless to say, all my progress in that game is long gone, never to be reclaimed. I swore then that I would never trust a game I couldn't play independently ever again. And now here we are.
Just in case Nick reads this: when the sponsor is at the start, I watch/listen through as I get comfortable for the main video. When the sponsor cuts in the middle I skip/skip/skip!
@@theescapist hopefully your parent company continues to only have them at the start, either way thank you and the rest of the team for the great content over the years
Back when steam was a new thing, I was hesitant to start putting money into it for fear of what would happen if the platform ever went away. But then I remembered that games were super easy to pirate so anything lost could be easily gained back for free, which made me more confident in spending money on the platform. Still, I keep installation files of everything I buy from GoG on a physical backup drive just in case we ever find ourselves in some post-internet world where we still have time for video games.
I shudder at the notion that piracy makes up for a lack of archives and preservation as someone actually trained in the field. It's just as dependent on commercial appeal, not historical importance.
@@ninjacat230 is there a tutorial? I'd be interested in knowing how to access Steam games without having to use the launcher, or for offline access should the need arise.
The problem is much less Steam and its DRM and much more games that are designed around anti-preservation at the outset. Games like Rainbow Six Siege, The Crew, etc. are based on a central server, which means no amount of backups or physical copies will ever keep the game from being rendered unplayable when their central servers shut down. Worst of all, that's basically the way that most games which come out today are released. Diablo 4 is an innately ephemeral product - if you love the game and want to show it to your grandkids when you're 70, guess what? The game will no longer exist in any capacity by then because the central server will have shut down. The problem of games preservation goes much deeper than just owning physical copies or having backups of games or relying on pirate sites to archive games for future generations. This is ultimately a legal battle which people need to start fighting if they want most of this generation of games to actually exist several decades from now.
On the topic of remakes replacing the original, something cool that was done with the Atelier Marie Remake was including the original version in the remaked version - more companies should do this IMO if they're not putting them up on other storefronts. Though it failed the "have a physical version" checkbox in the US/EU...
Physical copies are important to me because, as a young kid, there was no greater joy than skipping up to the local pawn chain and flipping through their pre-owned PS2 games, most of which were readily within reach of my pocket money.
Yeah, every independent game shop in my old home town has gone out of business. That hurts, to be honest. Not just those specific places have been killed by digital distribution, but a whole way of experiencing gaming as a hobby with it.
Doubt Yahtzee or any of the Escapist team will see this. But Ross Scott of Freemans Mind/Ross Game Dungeon has been beating the drum on game preservation and online only games for years and I feel he and Yahtzee would do great together in a video talking about the idea. And Ross on a regular basis does talks with others on various subjects. So I think it would help to get the ideas out.
3:57 This really is the sticking point for me. I love physical media, because every game I buy is a part of my story, and I often go back to replay old games to remember that story, as cheesy as that sounds. When I'm getting too jaded with today's industry, I like to replay old games from my childhood to remind me why I love the medium in the first place.
One of the aspects of ownership people tend to overlook is that one of the legal definitions of ownership is one's right to give away or sell said item. So paying an exorbitant one-off fee for a digital product (which may or may not be in full working order or crash the console but that's a different gripe) that I cannot trade in or sell means that I have "bought" something that I legally do not own.
How timely. I was just having a conversation on a motorcycle discord this morning about an ebike company that went under and everyone is scrambling to get new certificates generated so that they will be able to continue using their ebikes after the servers are gone.... It amazes me just how applicable a conversation about video games and digital only release is to a physical frigging bicycle with a motor on it...
@@BLZ231 it's an eBike, not a motorcycle, but yeah, apparently the software on the bike requires a certificate loaded in the mobile app to authenticate yourself to the bike before it will "turn on" I guess. I mean, you could still obviously pedal it, but I imagine most people buying an eBike spend all the extra money to not need to pedal, lol.
@@BLZ231 Also, Zero Motorcycles have monthly subscriptions and DLC, Newer BMWs do as well, so if those servers go down, you'll lose access to things like fast charging, range, and performance in the case of Zero, and things like heated seats, cruise control, automatic highbeams, etc... in the case of BMW
I'm increasingly of the opinion that, when games and consoles go out of publication, the owners should be required to hand the binaries and source code and schematics to a public historical preservation agency for permanent archival in the public domain.
laughed out loud in the office three times Regardless of Yahtzee's sense of humor which is always on point, he's on point with the rest of this. I buy physical copies of everything I thoroughly enjoy. It's a way to display games I love and it's a way to preserve them. I don't want to have to keep gigantic amounts of space on my hardware via sd cards so I can play whatever I want whenever I want - when I can just pop a cd or a cart in and play it straight away. I'm also as old as Yahtzee and thus remember a time when all we *had* was physical games, and I suppose that is still ingrained in me in some way as well. I don't buy every book I read, but I do buy ones I want to reread at any moment I feel like doing so. I don't buy physical copies of every game I play, but I do buy ones I wanna love some more. And love them I do.
I'm glad i'm not the only one who values older media as time capsules of the cultural zeitgeist of their times as well as being timeless art / hilarious shlock / [insert adjective here].Not that everything was better back then (or even now), but such things do deserve to be remembered, be they successful or failurific; aged like fine wine, or like forgotten leftovers. You get the point 👍
Adobe lost a lawsuit because of the first sale doctrine. Not long after, Adobe replaced their product suite with Creative Cloud. This is not a coincidence.
Personally I quite liked the story of L.A. Noire even if it was a bit basic. For me what tanked the game was shoe-horning in GTA gunplay where it always felt forced. It was never fun and it always killed the momentum of the story I felt like. I literally just wanted to drive around, pick up clues, and ask questions, at most the occasional car chase
That's one play I'm gutted I wasn't aware of until it was too late, I would've loved to have seen a performance. It's such an interesting concept (especially as a Simpsons fan). Yes I got the published script out the library, but reading a script is never as good as seeing a play performed in front of you - especially with how bonkers Act 3 of Mr Burns is. But then plays are pretty much the ultimate in ephemeral art - it only lasts for as long as the play runs and then it's gone forever, lasting only in the memories of the audience members who stumped up for a ticket. In other words: more theatre companies should film their performances, we have the technology to do so now!
I'm in that group of never having read or seen it but it sounds up my alley! No fear, I just checked youtube and there's a number of recordings! Not the same as seeing them live, but I'm definitely adding it to my watchlist.
This is why I still buy physical copies of console games. I've had enough bad luck with programs like iTunes wiping out my digital collections that I frankly don't trust these companies to keep my purchases safe.
I got burned on books back when the Barnes and Noble Nook was still a thing, and since then I've made a point to keep DRM-free copies of all books/audiobooks I buy. Ideally I buy them DRM-free to begin with, but Amazon's near-monopoly makes this difficult. Thankfully between calibre and ffmpeg's ability to strip DRM from audible using your own account key helps.
Your always online part stirred something in me. I was in the Navy when the idea of always online games where just starting to get floated around. My thought was, "Well, that sucks. I can't play it during deployment". I don't know what internet is like on Naval ships now but back then, you only had 2 hours of internet that didn't block non-work or non-educational sites and imagine the bandwidth of those 2 hours when you and a Carrier full of 4000-5000 other people wanted to get on MySpace (or anything else). Thankfully, the always online thing was only a concept being floated around back then; we spent a lot of downtime playing NHL 2K, Halo, FIFA, and (ironically) Ace Combat.
Libraries also carry movies, I feel like I always need to say this. I'm sure some libraries carry videogames, but that's kind of complicated, my local library has board games you can take out, which is a lot simpler. There's also a whole Thing with libraries giving digital rentals of ebooks that's complicated and some people exploit the system and the publishers really hate it and fight it at every turn (publishers would definitely kill libraries if they thought they could, just like how game companies really hated and despised game rentals back in the day).
Keep banging this drum forever! Its beyond stupid that so much gaming history is being erased in the first place and like you say. I want to be able to still play my favourite titles 20 years down the line in all their original 'glory'
There’s always the seven seas. The age of digital media is actually excellent for preserving things, you just have to look carefully. It’s not like older books or movies, where a lot of them have genuinely been erased from existence by time and neglect.
@@AWanderingSwordsman I'm very much a physical collector and I'll admit it's easier now to digitally grab a game, I concede. I admit it's mostly frustration in the physical media not being available, erasure is probably hyperbolic in this sense. I just want physical media to be more available without extreme costs
@@AWanderingSwordsman Finding games that are 20 years old or older isn't too hard, but many games over the last 10 years are more difficult, if not downright unplayable like Ace Combat Infinity.
@@scottthewaterwarrior true but emulation takes time. From a preservation point of view though, the files are still easy to get, it just needs better emulation, which becomes exponentially easier as hardware improves and you need a less efficient method to make it work.
Whatever else people may think of piracy, at the very least it can't be argued that it played an i credibly important role in preserving (digital) media of all types.
Piracy is extremely important in the preservation of all media. Nosferatu, the 1922 silent film, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The studio got sued by the Stoker estate, which won, and all copies of the films were ordered to be destroyed.This was in a time where films were on film and they could burst into flames from the touch of a summer wind- and the only reason that we still have Nosferatu, one of the most influential films on cinema in general and especially modern horror, is due to ‘pirates’- French film conservationists. They were technically breaking the law, but how poorer the artistic world would be if they didn't.
Another big issue: If Steam were to shut down today, millions of people would lose access to (probably?) billions of games they bought and "own". Plus the problem of not being able to sell games you don't want to play anymore.
6:23 I went to a Games-focused university (just to do 3d art mind-you), but every designer we kept getting lumped in with would go "I've got this new and innovative idea! It's -insert old game's exact premise here-" One guy said "I've come up with this game where you play a ghost who must solve Rube Golberg-like environment puzzles to achieve a goal!" I said. "That's just Ghost Trick" He said "What's Ghost Trick?" We made a playable version. It was just Ghost Trick.
On the PC side I haven't seen a laptop or PC tower that comes with a disc mechanic for a long long time... Maybe physical releases of games should be read-only thumb drives
I'm okay with the releases themselves being digital, so long as you are still allowed to download them entirely and can play them entirely offline (not including any online multiplayer aspects and such, obviously).
@@edisontrent618 This still creates the issue where, if the content is removed from the hosting server and you happened to not have your game saved to a drive (or your drive malfunctions) you still lose your game. I do not want to have to rely on any service outside of my control for access to my games.
@@TopTwom Yes, but at least at that point the chances of at least someone having a copy and being able and willing to share it with everyone is darn near 100%. Like, yeah, your personal hard drive could break, but a CD can get scratched, lost, destroyed in a house fire, etc, etc. Obviously both downloadable and offline-playable and (full) physical-copy options would be best. But sadly I think that the days of forcing big gaming corporations to go back to the days of the late 90's/early 2000's gaming is secondary to just denying the "videogames as a subscription service" movement.
Thing is, I absolutely love having everything digital and at my fingertips. It's only my distrust of game companies that is preventing me from going full digital
This is the hill Ross Scott has been standing on and yelling about awkwardly for a while now. The state of game preservation is abysmal, we'll have more actual games from the 80s-90s preserved than from the 2020s if the live service cancer keeps spreading.
There's another angle that gets overlooked. I have ADHD, which compromises my object permanence - if I only own things digitally, I forget about them. If they're on a shelf then there's a reminder of their existence sat just behind my desk, and I'm that little bit more likely to actually get round to enjoying them.
the thing is that there basically is no escaping the need to download games over the internet at this point. games keep getting bigger and bigger and very few modern AAA games will even fit on an optical disk, so now most "physical" game disks are basically just fancy installers and DRM keys. add on to that the fact that we now expect games to be actively patched to fix bugs and add features, and many newer games being basically unplayable on a hard drive, let alone an optical disk. until someone comes up with a cost-effective way to distribute games in their own little high-capacity, high-speed SSDs where they can also be updated, i really dont think we're getting out of the current paradigm. i think the real solution here is to encourage DRM-free digital games that you actually own, and stop trying to tie ourselves down to basically obsolete physical media
To Capcom's credit, the original and remake versions of ResiEvil4 exist side-by-side on digital store fronts, which is nice. But yes, it's kinda wild to me that there's no (legal) equivalent version of a library for games, where you can borrow things or rent things, especially for older games. I know the reason has something to do with lots of big game publishers not WANTING you to be able to do so, because like Yahtzee said, they want you to generally just focus on whatever the newest shiniest thing is. Which sucks, because most AAA games are boring and I'd rather just play what I want WHEN i want instead of constantly feeling like i need to 'keep up' because of publishers, influencers, games media, etc always pushing the "Play the newest thing NOW you better keep up" narrative. No, you don't ACTUALLY have to "keep up" with every new release. You can just play stuff as you want, and you ought to be able to go back and experience the things you missed the first time around (or re-experience) via a library-like system safe in the knowledge that it'll always be there, rather than pay some reseller twice+ the original price on eBay for the luxury of having a physical copy of a 20 year old game.
Speaking of remasters I’ve noticed almost every single remaster fucks up the lighting it’s almost impressive how inept so many devs are at not messing up lighting when “improving it”.
This is coming hot off the heels of me purchasing a bunch of blu rays of tv shows I can no longer watch on the streaming service that is canceling its own shows to create an artificial loss on its corporate balance sheets to avoid the double whammy of bad sales and taxes that means the c-suite executives don’t get their extra yacht this year. These violent delights have violent ends.
I've been thinking more and more lately about what's going to happen to steam one day if it decides to trim down it's supported library. I have over a decade of finished, half played, and sometimes untouched games I'd nonetheless like to own forever. I did buy them after all.
You didn't buy them as much as you bought a license to access them. I would be pretty confident in saying that somewhere within the purchase agreement lies a line stating that your access can be revoked at anytime. I believe physical disc purchases work the same way, but unless there is an always online component, they can't do anything to actually take it away from you.
Even if they remove from their supported library (why would they ever do this though?), the copy you've downloaded isn't going anywhere. You just won't be able to redownload it. And the second they do that, a ton of people will just crack each removed game and put it up for free if you really care. There's really very little difference between a hard drive and a physical disc. One is just usually stored inside your computer.
Indeed, though for the moment Steam seem to have the right people in charge, folks that actually care about the landscape of the industry not just making a quick buck. Hence all the innovative hardware and effort put into things like Proton. So even if they stop selling it they probably will keep hosting it for you, or at the very least give warning that is going away. But companies get bought, inherited, desperate to keep the lights on etc so past decency is no certainty of it into the future. Has to be said though many games on Steam don't care about online or require Steam running at all, Steam just shipped you the application so as long as your OS can still launch that application you can keep playing. Which with things like Proton/Wine emulator and virtual machines to provide translation from old hardware to new means many (though not all!) Steam games will keep working pretty painlessly as long as you don't loose the files even if Valve has cracked under the pressure and let out all the water vapour...
It's already a reality. There's a number of games I have owned that are now no longer available. They were multiplayer titles, so without servers and no local hosting available, the client's just fail to connect to anything.
@@tannermattingly4462 That't not a digital issue though, thats an online issue. Even if you had the game on a disc, it would make zero difference, because you still require connecting to a server for multiplayer. That said, almost every multiplayer game with a large community puts up a fan server after the official ones go down so theres a decent chance you could still play those games.
I feel like I never see my biggest grievance with "always-online" gaming brought up: the idea that I can be a grown man with a full-time job, but still have to ask someone for permission before I'm allowed to play my games. It's not the most practical argument, sure, but it REALLY rubs me up the wrong way.
It's debatable how much ownership you ever had, as even with physical media you were paying for license to use it rather than actual ownership. I am not sure how exactly movies/TV/books work in comparison, but I assume it's not that far different. The main difference games being software, first and foremost. Of course just like Yahtzee said in video about pirating, there is no actual enforcement of how you can use the license of games you bought - but not because they wouldn't want to but rather because it's impossible. You weren't really supposed to lend them for example. There was various attempts(by EA and I think Microsoft too?) to monetize resold games but I am not sure how that worked law-wise, I assume it wasn't strictly fine by terms and conditions. Game preservation by itself is good and reasonable as it lets you experience past titles and how the medium evolved over time. But due to eventual end of life of physical media ironically digital distribution is better for that. The issue is that there is usually no way to purchase older games. Hard to blame anyone for piracy or emulating when there is no proper, legal way to obtain license to game or buy hardware for it. It's more annoying when companies like Nintendo do their best to put emulators down, while still profiting from them and even selling time-limited digital licenses to their old games. Maybe companies will be eventually forced by law to make previous products easily accessible online, but somehow I doubt that though it'd be the good solution. Then it's debatable how would average gamer even use the preserved, older versions of games. Sure some people might want to revisit a game from their childhood, but most people will just engage with new releases - as it's hard to blame anyone as there is so much media coming out nowadays - and not just games. If you don't earn living by gaming or just gaming most of your (free) time, there's no real way to keep up just with games. This way I wouldn't think of remakes as replacements, because I genuinely doubt a lot of people who appealed RE4R to or maybe even more recent System Shock remake being better example, would go back to revisit those games. I'd say they are just alternative versions or arguably pretty much different things sharing same name and some basic gameplay or story elements. Same way you can have 20 modern military shooters under different names being different titles, despite sharing the same common elements. Though I guess this is just Ship of Theseus argument, in a way. If games were to be considered more stand-alone, then maybe putting them into public domain after 10-20 years would be reasonable and the best solution. Then there are various open-source versions of commercial games built from ground-up by reverse engineering. Which might be good tip in general - if you want freedom of choice in the future, of having options then you should opt for open-source solutions. Replacing Windows with Linux and such.
Microsoft trying to monetize resold games is one of the reasons the PS4 crushed the Xbox One. Sony even made joke videos about how easy it was to lend a game to a friend off the back of this.
@@MrMikeJJ There was also backlash over the initial plan to have it require a persistent internet connection and the Kinect plugged in order to work, plus have it be always on and listening for commands. Many comparisons to the Telescreens from 1984 were made. Then a few years later, all those same people put an Amazon Alexa in their living room anyway.
The public domain thing is something I think about a lot as well. Of course passing laws in regards to that would be hell, since it would most likely need to be something global, but having software (or even just games specifically) become open-source after a set amount of time after release would be great for both preservation and for giving people a chance to play something they might not be able to otherwise. That said, I see companies trying all sorts of things in order to find loopholes and keep their games locked out, for example by making them live services forever or something lmao
I mean, you do own your copy of a physical game, there are just restrictions to what you can do with it. Same thing with your car. You own it, doesn't mean you can drive it wherever or however you want.
That’s why I will die on the physical media hill. Won’t buy a game if it’s digital-only, will wait until it gets a physical like what Baldur’s Gate 3 did or through publishers like Limited Run
We need either laws clarifying what a digital purchase is (rent or actual purchase?) or a law saying that when a service that is part of a product is discontinued, it needs to be handed over to the general public.
Most of the digital services have family sharing (which doesn't have to be family). It's obviously not quite as free as sharing around a physical copy, but it sure is convenient that you can easily share with someone thats not within convenient driving distance.
@AWanderingSwordsman Steam's family sharing in particular feels significantly more convenient and free than sharing a physical game. Of course Steam and Valve are also strictly digital only, always have been, and always will be.
I’m glad that while Konami is often the scum of the earth, even as they gear up to make a remake of MGS3, they give us a classic Metal Gear collection, complete with the first three MGS games and the first two Metal Gear games, and then they’re also throwing in the two inferior metal gear games, which are being listed basically alongside the bonus features, meaning the old good stuff is there and the old shit is still available for preservation purposes because when else would anyone bother making them more available
It's worth noting that if a game is only released digitally, you cannot buy a used copy of it. You will always be subjected to the price on the online store, rather than paying for someone's unwanted disc.
Our attachement to internet is so absolute that I had a very funny and frustrating interaction today related to it. The short version is I had to call to replace the card on file for my ISP because it was decliend and my internet got turned off. Being one of those weird people with a flip phone and desk top computer I got their phone number off the side of my modem and called to update the card. The phone person spent the first 10 minutes trying to talk me into using their online service to update my payment method. I informed her I couldn't which is why I called. She said, "oh no its super easy you just go to our website.." "I can't" "well if you don't know the address I can email a link to you" "i can't access my email." "the online utility is easier and you don't have to wait on hold on the phone" at which point I had to remind her that I had called because my internet had been turned off, that is why I was on the phone with her in the first place. There was a long pause and she said, I kid you not, "well yes but we could reactivate your internet as soon as we get your payment and it would be faster to make your payment online" at which point i hung up, called back,and thankfully got someone that understood why they would have to take my card over the phone.
Yahtzee I agree with you I do, but I think we both know physical disc copies just won't last. There's just not enough incentive on either side to manage it, collectors still get pretty boxes and companies make more money doing digital releases. I will miss it all though.
And that's why I buy on GOG, I actually own those games and can install them on any system regardless of if I lose my account there or not (and I don't need a client).
People keep asking me if I'm excited for the Silent Hill 2 remake because I keep saying how Silent Hill 2 is one of the best games I've ever played. I tell people I am the opposite of excited for it, because I would much rather a faithful port of the original is brought to availability for modern hardware. I am a firm believer that these game remakes should come with a port of the original as well, because I truly doubt that the Silent Hill 2 Remake will successfully capture any of what made the original magical, even if the PS2 version has an awful camera and tank controls. And actually every other reason Yahtzee said also pops up in my mind. If we're trying to preserve art, it needs to be kept intact, warts and all.
Thing is, digital media *should* last forever. A lot longer than the plastic on a disc or the hardware used to run it. The fact that some companies are giving things an artificial lifespan annoys me to no end. So I'm grateful for the people who decompile, who make server emulators, who scan boxart of weird European adventure games that were released in only one country.
"physical copy" is a red herring. I have DVDs of games I can't play anymore, because they had always-online DRM or were online/multiplayer only to begin with, and all servers were shut down. Meanwhile I can play my digitally distributed GOG collection (or NES ROMs) just fine by copy-pasting it from old hard drive to a new one once in ~5 years.
Even movies have this issue from time to time! Is it wild that I want to own something that was meaningful to me, and possibly share it with friends and family into the future, even if that studio no longer exists or cares about it!
I grabbed the original RE4 when it was on sale before the remake released just because I was afraid they'd pull the original from sale and I wanted to have the option of playing it as it was. Of course, nearly all my games are digital thanks to having a digital only PS5 and not previously owning a PS4 or corresponding PS4 game discs. I do have the original Kingdoms of Amalur for PC on disc, but I also bought the original on Steam first and then snagged a collector's edition later on. I have the collector's edition of Re-Reckoning as well, but it really did come with just a Steam code rather than a physical disc. All my other games that I have physical copies of are for my DS Lite or Gameboy Color, which both required physical copies of games for obvious reasons. While I do worry about my favorite games being unplayable, they're also single-player games (or primarily single-player) and I won't be affected if the servers go offline since I already play them offline. I think it really is a case that if the entirety of the internet goes down we'll all probably have bigger things to worry about than not being able to play our games. That said, when it comes to books, manga, favorite shows/movies, etc, I do buy physical copies of those. I get tired of tech at times and at least I know my books will always work unless they get burned or some shit.
This is why I made GOG my primary store ages ago. People often complain about lack of ownership, but rarely talk about DRM-Free stores. As for the Robot Cache ad, unless you can still sell DELISTED games, that concept is pretty pointless I would argue.
I loved tex murphy games SO MUCH as a kid. Martian Memorandum looked like crap in some places but used some really innovative tricks in others, plus the Noir in Space esthetic was awesome
I know its a small thing but thank you escapist for hearing us out last time about not wanting ads in the middle of the video, if you have to do ads its whatever but thank you for at least putting them in the front and not the middle
Does anyone remember the 2001 Aliens versus Predator 2? Three (great) intertwined campaigns and amazing multiplayer? If you've never heard of it, that might be related to the fact that you can't find it on *any* digital storefront. See, it was made by Monolith but *published* by Sierra (remember them from way back?). While Monolith is still kicking around, Sierra stopped existing over a decade ago. So the rights for the game are...somewhere, maybe languishing in a forgotten filing cabinet. In practical terms, this means the game can no longer be sold and might as well not even exist. It's Lost Media at this point (because of rights issues, mind); if you didn't play it when it came out, you'll never get to.
It's kind of validating to hear Yahtzee weighing in on, as it's something I feel like the solitary weirdo in my circle of friends for worrying about. It's a big reason why I prefer PC gaming above all else: the massive library and ability to play most games in history, either using a disc or emulation. It is worth pointing out, though, that digital distribution (which makes sense, given how many discs some games would require these days) does not necessarily preclude ownership. A storefront like Good Old Games demonstrates this perfectly, letting you buy and download the installation files for your games to do with as you please - arguably the gold standard for digital distribution. In that context, services like Game Pass have my blessing to fill the niche as a complentary and ephemeral experience.
The reason gamers’ desire for physical games is fought so much is the people who actually make them now are McDonalds execs riding the CEO chair and the notion of doing something for art or preservation sake is so alien it might as well be in another language.
Digital copies are arguably easier to preserve than physical ones so this makes no sense. Like, find me a game thats older than 15 years old that you can't easily pirate. You can't. It's all preserved online.
@@AWanderingSwordsman The thing is, the ones about 15ish years ago or 20 are the ones that need that preservation. I don't care about Ubisofts latest excuse to print money, but Shadow Hearts, Soul Caliburs 1-3, Saints Row, Koudelka - Blazing Dragons? Those are all parts of companies that have gone belly-up and still on the rights but don't bother to put out copies. Thy are lost to time and eBay.
@@mesektet5776 Maybe you misread but I said all the games from 15 years+ ago are preserved completely. I challenge you to find a single one that is unable to be emulated. All of the ones you mentioned for instance can be emulated. It's all perfectly preserved and immune to scarcity in a way old physical media isn't.
@@AWanderingSwordsman I have yet to find any of my beloved Shadow Hearts games. I’ve never heard of it emulated and Midway was carved up into so many pieces I doubt any of the property dragons will even check their hoards for it, much less ever use it.
as a personal rule, i only buy a game if it has an offline, single-player mode and comes on a physical copy. it's...kinda limiting my options this generation, if i'm being honest. more and more games on my shelf are imports or previous-gen versions because they were my only options. ...also i may need to check that game out and add it to the backlog. thanks, yahtzee.
Top shelf licker, dude. I could never find some thread for a video game about rediscovering your life through a ghola-style reincarnation element in a Dead Island setting, but reading through Durarara threads changed my life. And there was that sweet moment popping in on D
I think that something missing from the conversation is that some games have what is essentially a limited life span… my examples is Star Wars Galaxies a Game I bought the collector edition for and never got to play for one reason or another and eventually it ceased to exist and now all that is left are memories… can you imagine if the Godfather Trilogy you only had a certain amount of years to watch it and the all the copies exploded …
Game preservation is a hot and valuable topic! Video games are art and we need to ensure that they can be enjoyed down the line, even if that's not going to make the publishers or investors gobs of dough like a hack job remake would
Pirates and emulators are unironically the pioneers of game preservation, there is nothing illegal about downloading a DRM free copy of a game you already bought but lost the disk to or it never had a disk to begin with (or can't be bought anymore) Private servers for MMOs also serve a similar purpose preserving the even more ephemeral MMO games that are always under the threat of disappearing without a trace once their official servers shutdown for good....ahoy mates. On a more serious note, for someone who prouds himself of being anti-corporate it's utterly bizzare and cognitively dissonant to mindlessly be trusting of some of the most corrupt callous greedy corporations in humsn history who knowingly gave people cancer just because they didn't bother putting a fucking warning label on the goddamn carcinogenic baby powder or sunscreen. And despite losing their cases they still laugh their way to the bank regularly because some condesending people are so ideologically brainwashed by the soulless talking heads in mainstream media who are funded by the same exact corporations that they refuse to entertain the idea that their deeply entrenched belief was utter horse shit and that they have been lied to all this time or even that two things could be true at the same time...OH, NO no no.. they instead go..."WE are the smart educated ones, we aren't like those stupid unwashed other guys over there who take horse medicine, harumph"
I have the weird experience that the only physical games I think I've bought in the last 8+ years are titles for my Switch Lite, and that's due to its abysmal memory capacity. I understand the theoretical risks of Steam collapsing into a black hole, but it's just a lot more convenient to get games there, plus indie studios often just don't have the spare budget to make those physical copies. My current PC doesn't even have a disk drive, and I have yet to encounter a problem with that fact. It's just the way tech has moved.
Robot Alchemic Drive, aka R.A.D; is a goddamn classic, with voice acting that is just... Perfect. And it deserves to be remembered! Remembered, remastered; re-released, and remade! With Big O/Roger Smith dlc! Because that would be amazing! And it's the perfect game for it! Let us pilot Big O! 😭
The issue isn't physical vs. digital, because there are physical games that require you to always be online (and regardless of your connection strength, those servers will go down someday), and digital games can be preserved very easily; the issue is DRM. Buying a game from Steam is renting it; buying a game from GOG is owning it. The reason people still cling to physical for preservation is because on consoles, it's hard to impossible to preserve digital games; it's totally different on PC.
I knida wish that more PC games were still available in Physical form. And if you don't have DVD/Blue Ray drive then you could still activate a code & download the game. Also it would be awesome if multi-platform would be a basic standard instead of exclusivity (you buy a game, a license and it is up to you what platform you want to play on). Exclusivity in the long term is the worst as it makes it impossible to play older games. If a game was not ever released on PC and the platform it was made on is dead - then the only way is to emulate it - assuming that physical copy was released at some point. I think there were some Nintendo Wii or Wii U games that were digital store only, and since those stores are offline for a long time - there is no way to obtain a copy, as you can not buy used one or download .iso file.
About physical disks and theoretically using it 100 years later: physical media fails all the time. HDDs fail with mean time of 4-5 years, CD-ROMs have a good chance of failure after 10 years (not that we should ever go back to CDs). Sure, we can achieve longer times to failure by not using the media but I don’t think games should only be “theoretically” playable. What we should really have the capability for is true archiving - to allow copying for redundancy and regeneration of data. This stands in opposition to DRM which does not like copying data. I get why devs want DRMs but they are so obnoxiously bad. Perhaps a compromise can be that collectors editions can be DRM free and allows copying. Or, perhaps DRMs can expire based on console lifetimes (eg 10 years). Then again, companies (eg Nintendo) monetize their 20+ year old games, and these companies would feel threatened by such archives and not comply.
Whatever happened to French courts deciding that Steam has to grant you ownership of a game you buy, thus allowing you to sell it. The story came up a few years ago and Steam immediately went to appeal the decision. Heard nothing ever since
This is why I find the PC port important to game preservation, I have a ton of old game discs, but a hard drive is much more simple to future proof. Now I can hold on to the Persona collection without needing to hold on to the PS Vita I never bought. The only problem is Nintendo refuses to use PC or even rerelease most games after N64 era in a virtual capacity, so yes piracy is a necessity for preservation. I just wanted to play Fire Emblem Radiance series without breaking the bank on second hand discs.
I'm a student getting Library Information Sciences Masters and this is the area I want to focus in. I did some research into present video game preservation and the issue is worse than you may think. Older games are easier to preserve largely because of the simplicity of the platforms they are on, at least simple in comparison to modern day platforms. Emulation came up in my research and the 'newer' games have not yet been emulated due to the complexities of platforms they're on. I believe it's PS3 and onward. Additionally to this, when academic research is conducted in the area, academics often go to the fans of the games for much of their research. Surveys have even confirmed that developers and publishers care little for preservation, with at least one developer saying, "preservation is a job for the fans." If there's a property you're remotely interested in and may want to play it at a later date then you may want to consider other avenues to acquiring it. Not all hope is lost as a few professionals have recognized that this is a pressing issue. The people at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) run more of an archive than a museum. MADE has a very special exemption to copyright law as well. They are allowed to preserve anything and everything. However, none of the material they preserve can be circulated beyond the doors of their facility. You can visit the museum and play the original Mario Bros on original console, controller, and even CRT, but none of that can be checked out. Since this is an issue I am passionate about, I'm going to go post this on the Escapist as well.
Shout out for persona for making a remaster of Persona 3 as well as simply re-releasing persona 3 on steam. You get the past as well as the upgraded version. Another similar-ish idea was how the halo 1 remaster enabled quick toggling between the old and remastered graphics. I had so much fun comparing them. I think it should be common practice to release a direct re-release alongside remakes, hell even put them in the same CD or download.
Eh. Speaking as someone who used to be hardcore physical, the ship has sailed on this. In the case of PC games, it sailed 20 years ago. Sure, I managed to get a copy of Duke Nukem Forever and Starcraft 2 (The first two chapters anyway.) but those were Events. The first was a game that I never thought would actually come out so I wanted a physical copy to commemorate it The second (terran) was Starcraft 2 which was both an event piece and the lore book inside was worth the purchase. The Zerg box was solely because, as a Zerg player, I had searched until I could find the Zerg box for the first one (which I then got rid of in a move) and I felt the need to do that for Starcraft 2 as an homage to my youth. As for consoles, that's taken longer and had a rocky start but the ship has sailed on that as well. Some of that was lootboxes. After getting Gears 4, it was just easier to rebuy it as a digital copy so I could log in every day and get my bounty/scrap than constantly changing discs. Most of it was just convenience and a sensing of how the winds had shifted. We went into the PSWii60 stating that we will never abandon physical. By the end, PSN/XBLI/XBA games as well as DLC had been deemed perfectly acceptable. By the end of the XBOX One/Switch/PS4, it's considered weird to get it physically. Less than 2% of my games are physical these days. The ones that are were there because of: 1) Not realizing how much the market had shifted at the beginning of Xbox One. 2) Commemoration games 3) Limited Storage on the Switch. (Going to break this into two posts.)
Another reason to keep banging the drum of how badly we need copyright reform. None of this would be a problem if copyright was more sensible, if intellectual property had a short life that fit the realities of the modern age, only the newest works were outside the public domain and we’d be able to reprint as many copies of Silent Hill 2 as we’d like. And maybe get Silent Hill games that didn’t suck.
Thank you to Robot Cache for sponsoring this video. Download Wasteland 3 for free courtesy of Robot Cache using this link: bit.ly/extrapunctuation
You mean it's NOT part of the Extra Punctuation??
Your sponsor sucks. And it's too sus
This is yet another blockchain cryptop scam. I am very disappointed in the Escapist for accepting this sponsorship.
@@SecretRaginMan that's pretty big if true
@@SecretRaginMan Hard to blame content creators accepting some say questionable ad stuff to sustain their show. They are just trying to get by not buying a 3rd house
A shoutout to the folks at Good Old Games who are not only preserving old games by selling you a large collection of older titles, but are also 100% DRM free, so you don't need to worry about the possibility that the servers will go down some day.
In addition, they also tweak the files so that those old games often work pretty well with modern software. GOG is a godsend to anyone that wants to play games while not being tethered to a service like Steam.
folks
Which also makes me highly respect the devs who publish their AAA game on gog day1, such as Larian, CDPR etc.
@@ThunderingRoarlet us not forget that CDPR, in fact, is basically the original creators of GOG, since bootlegging game copies is how they got into business in the first place.
@@ThunderingRoar Unless I missed a beat somewhere and my memory (and google) is failing me, praising CDPR for publishing on GoG is like giving praise for Portal 2 being released on Steam.
This is funny how this is coming up now. I may or may not have been looking into how to crack my entire steam library so that I can archive everything onto a personal server someday and have everything be accessible DRM-free. It would be really nice to not lose every game I've been buying for 15 years to any unforeseen circumstance.
I hear there's a whole bay of pirates attempting the same thing
Good thing we also have SteamDB, in case your hypothetical personal server comes into... unforeseen circumstances.
Luckly for you, gaben may or may not accidentally made it to be very easy for most games in the platform
tbh while I love steam despite it's shortcomings and faults, I look forward and fear what it's going to become once leadership inevitably has to change. We take a lot of it's features for granted and a more profit-minded person (as in "make shittons of money now and burn the place to the ground" levels of profit-minded) can and will take an Elon Musk-branded sledgehammer to the service.
@@dan_loup yes, the problem with Steam isn't even Steam DRM, because its a joke to crack, its all the Denuvos and such.
"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, teeheehee." There, I added the proper intro.
I Knew something was missing! Much obliged! 👍
No, you didn't. You mindlessly parroted something vaguely related to the channel, a default brainless UA-cam comment.
its more lets laugh at the customer who never learns anything lol
@@checker297 Well, we _are_ part of the industry.
It's not really about whether you need internet access or not. It's about the fact that the overwhelming majority of companies requiring it shut down the game after an indeterminate time, destroying the game and effectively robbing you of your purchase. The thing that doesn't get brought up enough is this practice has not been established as legal, despite the industry making billions from it. It's untested by the courts and for games that are sold as goods, depriving the buyer of it all functionality after the point of sale would be flatly illegal in many other industries.
Are there any examples of that happening for single player games though?
This level of conversation is the benefit of being slightly older gamers. There's history, knowledge, and the ability to compare to previous generations of content. I fear our younger gamers, not having this info at hand, are the ones really taking the gaming industry into a more disposable territory. So keep doing this sort of thing - for the kids!
After all, many of them are growing up thinking that day 1 DLC has just "always been there."
@Raziel312 Hey, ain't their fault their parents aren't saying no. They are not fully adult, the decisions end at the wallet holder.
I agree the younger gamers attitudes are the problem, but I won't say they are entirely at fault. Us older gamers did all we could to stop DLC, MTX, Day 1 Patches etc from happening, but the companies knew all they needed to do was keep at it until the new impressionable kids with no prior understanding showed up at took everything as they were handed it.
The blame lies of the industry... it knew exactly what it was doing.
I definitely think this issue is more to do with the consumers who don't care, no matter the age. The people who are content with most of the annoying business models of the industry. The people who want to buy every single repetitive game in a series, digitally preorder for useless things, and buy DLC that is meant to give the "full experience" instead of looking at other games.
@@if7723 That logic checks out until a kid steals the wallet and uses the debit card to whale on microtransactions. This happens pretty routinely.
This is why GOG's model (that is, the practice, not the store itself, I'm only slightly shilling for it) must not only be supported, but actively advocated for. It still has the same issue of the distributor deciding to pull merchandise but that applies to any store, physical or digital. GOG gives you the raw game files with zero DRM and it supports numerous older titles going back into the 80s. Preservation of gaming history and true ownership. Objects can be recalled, substances can be pulled, smart devices can be messed with via online updates, but nothing can be done to the full game files sitting in a drive.
No, we need to support a not-for-profit archive model. Relying on what makes a company money is not a good solution for retaining the history of a medium. Putting aside how availability will depend on commercial appeal, squabbles over revived IPs will make things disappear from storefronts, and history will be edited by companies just to preserve their profits.
Petition to have "Yahtzee with sparkly eyes" as a permanent recurring gag.
Before or after he had to play and review another landslide of soiled nappies we sometimes call 'games'?
@@deusexvesania1702 both
I mean it kind of is but it's a rarity
I like the idea that it codifies his actual awe of video games on occasion. He spends loads of time tearing them to crap because he knows what they can be and he wants that, but this is him saying "The dream is real!"
Vouching for that real quick!
The Completionist, Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and now Yahtzee each covered game preservation within 24 hours....Good.
LRG's is apparently making a new Shantae GBA game....Good.
They're also doing Plumbers Don't Wear Ties......Good?
Acting like LRG cares about preservation is laughable, they’re just manipulators of FOMO and the scarcity market working under the guise of the “charity” of publishing digital games, a practice that is utter nonsense when they do releases of games owned by Bethesda and Disney who can damn well publish physical copies themselves.
I thought plumbers don't wear ties was up on UA-cam, with links to the choices in the recommended videos?
If only Yahtzee's commenters could make the distinction between fuzzy-headed nostalgia and actual preservation, which I mention in this reply for no reason
Definitely good
The Completionist also covered it in a video a few months ago when he and his crew bought everything from the 3DS store. It was a lot tougher than they thought.
I'm an old man whose shaken his fist at his share of clouds, but I've been banging this drum of decades. I spent countless hours playing Neverwinter Nights on AOL (although the phone company certainly was counting those hours). Needless to say, all my progress in that game is long gone, never to be reclaimed. I swore then that I would never trust a game I couldn't play independently ever again. And now here we are.
2:03 I hope we get to see more of Yahtzee's "savvy consumer" sprite in the future.
6:09 as well as the "scary storyteller" sprite.
He's just so... _savvy!_
Just in case Nick reads this: when the sponsor is at the start, I watch/listen through as I get comfortable for the main video. When the sponsor cuts in the middle I skip/skip/skip!
Not always up to me!
@@theescapist hopefully your parent company continues to only have them at the start, either way thank you and the rest of the team for the great content over the years
i also need to wedge my discord moderator bulk into my gamer chair and retrieve my mountain dew enema for a minute before the video starts, it’s great
"get comfortable for the (7 minute) main video"
Same. Ill let play if it is at the start of the vid.
Back when steam was a new thing, I was hesitant to start putting money into it for fear of what would happen if the platform ever went away. But then I remembered that games were super easy to pirate so anything lost could be easily gained back for free, which made me more confident in spending money on the platform. Still, I keep installation files of everything I buy from GoG on a physical backup drive just in case we ever find ourselves in some post-internet world where we still have time for video games.
I shudder at the notion that piracy makes up for a lack of archives and preservation as someone actually trained in the field. It's just as dependent on commercial appeal, not historical importance.
Steam"s built-in DRM is trivial to circumvent and as non-invasive as you can get, so I don't really mind either.
@@ninjacat230 is there a tutorial? I'd be interested in knowing how to access Steam games without having to use the launcher, or for offline access should the need arise.
Seconded, just in case Steam goes evil(er).
The problem is much less Steam and its DRM and much more games that are designed around anti-preservation at the outset. Games like Rainbow Six Siege, The Crew, etc. are based on a central server, which means no amount of backups or physical copies will ever keep the game from being rendered unplayable when their central servers shut down. Worst of all, that's basically the way that most games which come out today are released. Diablo 4 is an innately ephemeral product - if you love the game and want to show it to your grandkids when you're 70, guess what? The game will no longer exist in any capacity by then because the central server will have shut down.
The problem of games preservation goes much deeper than just owning physical copies or having backups of games or relying on pirate sites to archive games for future generations. This is ultimately a legal battle which people need to start fighting if they want most of this generation of games to actually exist several decades from now.
On the topic of remakes replacing the original, something cool that was done with the Atelier Marie Remake was including the original version in the remaked version - more companies should do this IMO if they're not putting them up on other storefronts. Though it failed the "have a physical version" checkbox in the US/EU...
Physical copies are important to me because, as a young kid, there was no greater joy than skipping up to the local pawn chain and flipping through their pre-owned PS2 games, most of which were readily within reach of my pocket money.
Yeah, every independent game shop in my old home town has gone out of business. That hurts, to be honest. Not just those specific places have been killed by digital distribution, but a whole way of experiencing gaming as a hobby with it.
What a jolly image
Also easier to sell them when they turn out to be crap cuz most stuff wont have a demo like it should.
Indeed. On another topic, never was a fan of single player games requiring constant online connection and Denuvo is just plain evil.
@mr.sinjin-smyth exactly, a single player game should only require the electricity to run it, why does my online presence need to exist.
You had me at “It’s time to bang”
Doubt Yahtzee or any of the Escapist team will see this. But Ross Scott of Freemans Mind/Ross Game Dungeon has been beating the drum on game preservation and online only games for years and I feel he and Yahtzee would do great together in a video talking about the idea. And Ross on a regular basis does talks with others on various subjects. So I think it would help to get the ideas out.
7:10 the way the old guy walks around has more character than anything I have ever seen from LA Noir
3:57 This really is the sticking point for me. I love physical media, because every game I buy is a part of my story, and I often go back to replay old games to remember that story, as cheesy as that sounds. When I'm getting too jaded with today's industry, I like to replay old games from my childhood to remind me why I love the medium in the first place.
One of the aspects of ownership people tend to overlook is that one of the legal definitions of ownership is one's right to give away or sell said item. So paying an exorbitant one-off fee for a digital product (which may or may not be in full working order or crash the console but that's a different gripe) that I cannot trade in or sell means that I have "bought" something that I legally do not own.
4:22
Yatzhee just described my childhood gaming
"How can you know a movie is good, if you've never seen a bad one?"
How timely. I was just having a conversation on a motorcycle discord this morning about an ebike company that went under and everyone is scrambling to get new certificates generated so that they will be able to continue using their ebikes after the servers are gone.... It amazes me just how applicable a conversation about video games and digital only release is to a physical frigging bicycle with a motor on it...
Uh, what the hell kind of motorcycle needs servers to work? Are you talking about a real physical motorcycle?
@@BLZ231 it's an eBike, not a motorcycle, but yeah, apparently the software on the bike requires a certificate loaded in the mobile app to authenticate yourself to the bike before it will "turn on" I guess.
I mean, you could still obviously pedal it, but I imagine most people buying an eBike spend all the extra money to not need to pedal, lol.
@@BLZ231 Also, Zero Motorcycles have monthly subscriptions and DLC, Newer BMWs do as well, so if those servers go down, you'll lose access to things like fast charging, range, and performance in the case of Zero, and things like heated seats, cruise control, automatic highbeams, etc... in the case of BMW
@@FlesHBoX *facepalm*
I'm increasingly of the opinion that, when games and consoles go out of publication, the owners should be required to hand the binaries and source code and schematics to a public historical preservation agency for permanent archival in the public domain.
The Pirate Bay icon ~*chef's kiss*~
laughed out loud in the office three times
Regardless of Yahtzee's sense of humor which is always on point, he's on point with the rest of this. I buy physical copies of everything I thoroughly enjoy. It's a way to display games I love and it's a way to preserve them. I don't want to have to keep gigantic amounts of space on my hardware via sd cards so I can play whatever I want whenever I want - when I can just pop a cd or a cart in and play it straight away. I'm also as old as Yahtzee and thus remember a time when all we *had* was physical games, and I suppose that is still ingrained in me in some way as well. I don't buy every book I read, but I do buy ones I want to reread at any moment I feel like doing so. I don't buy physical copies of every game I play, but I do buy ones I wanna love some more. And love them I do.
Nothing you've physically bought since like 2014 actually contains the game tho
@@stitchfinger7678 I think you severely overestimate the amount of *modern* games I buy
"That's why libraries have never driven bookshops out of business".
Preach brother...
I'm glad i'm not the only one who values older media as time capsules of the cultural zeitgeist of their times as well as being timeless art / hilarious shlock / [insert adjective here].Not that everything was better back then (or even now), but such things do deserve to be remembered, be they successful or failurific; aged like fine wine, or like forgotten leftovers. You get the point 👍
Adobe lost a lawsuit because of the first sale doctrine. Not long after, Adobe replaced their product suite with Creative Cloud.
This is not a coincidence.
Personally I quite liked the story of L.A. Noire even if it was a bit basic. For me what tanked the game was shoe-horning in GTA gunplay where it always felt forced. It was never fun and it always killed the momentum of the story I felt like. I literally just wanted to drive around, pick up clues, and ask questions, at most the occasional car chase
3:15
I so enjoy how often people accidentally recreate Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play without presumably having ever read or seen it
That's one play I'm gutted I wasn't aware of until it was too late, I would've loved to have seen a performance. It's such an interesting concept (especially as a Simpsons fan). Yes I got the published script out the library, but reading a script is never as good as seeing a play performed in front of you - especially with how bonkers Act 3 of Mr Burns is.
But then plays are pretty much the ultimate in ephemeral art - it only lasts for as long as the play runs and then it's gone forever, lasting only in the memories of the audience members who stumped up for a ticket. In other words: more theatre companies should film their performances, we have the technology to do so now!
I'm in that group of never having read or seen it but it sounds up my alley!
No fear, I just checked youtube and there's a number of recordings! Not the same as seeing them live, but I'm definitely adding it to my watchlist.
@@BenCol It's not too late! You never know when a theatre company will decide to produce it!
@@LemonGrinder Enjoy!
This is why I still buy physical copies of console games. I've had enough bad luck with programs like iTunes wiping out my digital collections that I frankly don't trust these companies to keep my purchases safe.
Yes, same with itunes. I lost my whole library because my ipad broke and i lost my old email. I had proof i owned them but didnt matter
That's why I got a DAP and transfer all my iTunes music there.
I got burned on books back when the Barnes and Noble Nook was still a thing, and since then I've made a point to keep DRM-free copies of all books/audiobooks I buy. Ideally I buy them DRM-free to begin with, but Amazon's near-monopoly makes this difficult. Thankfully between calibre and ffmpeg's ability to strip DRM from audible using your own account key helps.
You say that we even own those anymore.
"..making every character look like photos pasted onto spoons."
And I lost it right there. 😆
Your always online part stirred something in me. I was in the Navy when the idea of always online games where just starting to get floated around. My thought was, "Well, that sucks. I can't play it during deployment". I don't know what internet is like on Naval ships now but back then, you only had 2 hours of internet that didn't block non-work or non-educational sites and imagine the bandwidth of those 2 hours when you and a Carrier full of 4000-5000 other people wanted to get on MySpace (or anything else). Thankfully, the always online thing was only a concept being floated around back then; we spent a lot of downtime playing NHL 2K, Halo, FIFA, and (ironically) Ace Combat.
Saw a post recently that said something to the effect of “if purchasing doesn’t mean ownership, piracy doesn’t sound like a crime”
Piracy is basically what preserves gaming history. Even online only games, if they are loved enough, will not go away. Like old MMOs.
Libraries also carry movies, I feel like I always need to say this. I'm sure some libraries carry videogames, but that's kind of complicated, my local library has board games you can take out, which is a lot simpler.
There's also a whole Thing with libraries giving digital rentals of ebooks that's complicated and some people exploit the system and the publishers really hate it and fight it at every turn (publishers would definitely kill libraries if they thought they could, just like how game companies really hated and despised game rentals back in the day).
Keep banging this drum forever! Its beyond stupid that so much gaming history is being erased in the first place and like you say. I want to be able to still play my favourite titles 20 years down the line in all their original 'glory'
Which gaming history is being erased exactly? Which game 20 years old or older cannot you find in 2 seconds for free by googling it?
There’s always the seven seas. The age of digital media is actually excellent for preserving things, you just have to look carefully. It’s not like older books or movies, where a lot of them have genuinely been erased from existence by time and neglect.
@@AWanderingSwordsman I'm very much a physical collector and I'll admit it's easier now to digitally grab a game, I concede. I admit it's mostly frustration in the physical media not being available, erasure is probably hyperbolic in this sense. I just want physical media to be more available without extreme costs
@@AWanderingSwordsman Finding games that are 20 years old or older isn't too hard, but many games over the last 10 years are more difficult, if not downright unplayable like Ace Combat Infinity.
@@scottthewaterwarrior true but emulation takes time. From a preservation point of view though, the files are still easy to get, it just needs better emulation, which becomes exponentially easier as hardware improves and you need a less efficient method to make it work.
Whatever else people may think of piracy, at the very least it can't be argued that it played an i credibly important role in preserving (digital) media of all types.
If/when most titles reach the public domain goal line, it will be via pirate copies
Piracy and Emulation is the best way to ensure the game is yours for good. Lots of games now get locked needing online verification.
Piracy is extremely important in the preservation of all media. Nosferatu, the 1922 silent film, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The studio got sued by the Stoker estate, which won, and all copies of the films were ordered to be destroyed.This was in a time where films were on film and they could burst into flames from the touch of a summer wind- and the only reason that we still have Nosferatu, one of the most influential films on cinema in general and especially modern horror, is due to ‘pirates’- French film conservationists. They were technically breaking the law, but how poorer the artistic world would be if they didn't.
@@dan_loup That public domain goal line is still like 40+ years away for even the first video "games."
We need 20 year max copyright terms...
@@scottthewaterwarrior Yep. it's pretty horrible as it is. "but to reach the goal as the current laws say", piracy is needed.
Game companies are somehow consistently managing to push more and more people to piracy. And, hey... I'm not complaining. More seeders for me!
Another big issue: If Steam were to shut down today, millions of people would lose access to (probably?) billions of games they bought and "own".
Plus the problem of not being able to sell games you don't want to play anymore.
Damn, these are the best arguments I've heard. Granted, I never gave too much thought to to the topic.
6:23 I went to a Games-focused university (just to do 3d art mind-you), but every designer we kept getting lumped in with would go "I've got this new and innovative idea! It's -insert old game's exact premise here-"
One guy said "I've come up with this game where you play a ghost who must solve Rube Golberg-like environment puzzles to achieve a goal!"
I said. "That's just Ghost Trick"
He said "What's Ghost Trick?"
We made a playable version.
It was just Ghost Trick.
How can you call something new and innovative if you don't bother observing the genre?
On the PC side I haven't seen a laptop or PC tower that comes with a disc mechanic for a long long time... Maybe physical releases of games should be read-only thumb drives
I'm okay with the releases themselves being digital, so long as you are still allowed to download them entirely and can play them entirely offline (not including any online multiplayer aspects and such, obviously).
@@edisontrent618 This still creates the issue where, if the content is removed from the hosting server and you happened to not have your game saved to a drive (or your drive malfunctions) you still lose your game. I do not want to have to rely on any service outside of my control for access to my games.
@@TopTwom Yes, but at least at that point the chances of at least someone having a copy and being able and willing to share it with everyone is darn near 100%. Like, yeah, your personal hard drive could break, but a CD can get scratched, lost, destroyed in a house fire, etc, etc.
Obviously both downloadable and offline-playable and (full) physical-copy options would be best. But sadly I think that the days of forcing big gaming corporations to go back to the days of the late 90's/early 2000's gaming is secondary to just denying the "videogames as a subscription service" movement.
Thing is, I absolutely love having everything digital and at my fingertips. It's only my distrust of game companies that is preventing me from going full digital
There’s a number of places where you can get DRM free copies. The seven seas are also a thing.
This is the hill Ross Scott has been standing on and yelling about awkwardly for a while now. The state of game preservation is abysmal, we'll have more actual games from the 80s-90s preserved than from the 2020s if the live service cancer keeps spreading.
There's another angle that gets overlooked. I have ADHD, which compromises my object permanence - if I only own things digitally, I forget about them. If they're on a shelf then there's a reminder of their existence sat just behind my desk, and I'm that little bit more likely to actually get round to enjoying them.
the thing is that there basically is no escaping the need to download games over the internet at this point. games keep getting bigger and bigger and very few modern AAA games will even fit on an optical disk, so now most "physical" game disks are basically just fancy installers and DRM keys. add on to that the fact that we now expect games to be actively patched to fix bugs and add features, and many newer games being basically unplayable on a hard drive, let alone an optical disk. until someone comes up with a cost-effective way to distribute games in their own little high-capacity, high-speed SSDs where they can also be updated, i really dont think we're getting out of the current paradigm. i think the real solution here is to encourage DRM-free digital games that you actually own, and stop trying to tie ourselves down to basically obsolete physical media
To Capcom's credit, the original and remake versions of ResiEvil4 exist side-by-side on digital store fronts, which is nice.
But yes, it's kinda wild to me that there's no (legal) equivalent version of a library for games, where you can borrow things or rent things, especially for older games. I know the reason has something to do with lots of big game publishers not WANTING you to be able to do so, because like Yahtzee said, they want you to generally just focus on whatever the newest shiniest thing is. Which sucks, because most AAA games are boring and I'd rather just play what I want WHEN i want instead of constantly feeling like i need to 'keep up' because of publishers, influencers, games media, etc always pushing the "Play the newest thing NOW you better keep up" narrative. No, you don't ACTUALLY have to "keep up" with every new release. You can just play stuff as you want, and you ought to be able to go back and experience the things you missed the first time around (or re-experience) via a library-like system safe in the knowledge that it'll always be there, rather than pay some reseller twice+ the original price on eBay for the luxury of having a physical copy of a 20 year old game.
Speaking of remasters I’ve noticed almost every single remaster fucks up the lighting it’s almost impressive how inept so many devs are at not messing up lighting when “improving it”.
This is coming hot off the heels of me purchasing a bunch of blu rays of tv shows I can no longer watch on the streaming service that is canceling its own shows to create an artificial loss on its corporate balance sheets to avoid the double whammy of bad sales and taxes that means the c-suite executives don’t get their extra yacht this year. These violent delights have violent ends.
I've been thinking more and more lately about what's going to happen to steam one day if it decides to trim down it's supported library. I have over a decade of finished, half played, and sometimes untouched games I'd nonetheless like to own forever. I did buy them after all.
You didn't buy them as much as you bought a license to access them. I would be pretty confident in saying that somewhere within the purchase agreement lies a line stating that your access can be revoked at anytime.
I believe physical disc purchases work the same way, but unless there is an always online component, they can't do anything to actually take it away from you.
Even if they remove from their supported library (why would they ever do this though?), the copy you've downloaded isn't going anywhere. You just won't be able to redownload it. And the second they do that, a ton of people will just crack each removed game and put it up for free if you really care. There's really very little difference between a hard drive and a physical disc. One is just usually stored inside your computer.
Indeed, though for the moment Steam seem to have the right people in charge, folks that actually care about the landscape of the industry not just making a quick buck. Hence all the innovative hardware and effort put into things like Proton. So even if they stop selling it they probably will keep hosting it for you, or at the very least give warning that is going away. But companies get bought, inherited, desperate to keep the lights on etc so past decency is no certainty of it into the future.
Has to be said though many games on Steam don't care about online or require Steam running at all, Steam just shipped you the application so as long as your OS can still launch that application you can keep playing. Which with things like Proton/Wine emulator and virtual machines to provide translation from old hardware to new means many (though not all!) Steam games will keep working pretty painlessly as long as you don't loose the files even if Valve has cracked under the pressure and let out all the water vapour...
It's already a reality. There's a number of games I have owned that are now no longer available. They were multiplayer titles, so without servers and no local hosting available, the client's just fail to connect to anything.
@@tannermattingly4462 That't not a digital issue though, thats an online issue. Even if you had the game on a disc, it would make zero difference, because you still require connecting to a server for multiplayer. That said, almost every multiplayer game with a large community puts up a fan server after the official ones go down so theres a decent chance you could still play those games.
I feel like I never see my biggest grievance with "always-online" gaming brought up: the idea that I can be a grown man with a full-time job, but still have to ask someone for permission before I'm allowed to play my games. It's not the most practical argument, sure, but it REALLY rubs me up the wrong way.
It's debatable how much ownership you ever had, as even with physical media you were paying for license to use it rather than actual ownership. I am not sure how exactly movies/TV/books work in comparison, but I assume it's not that far different. The main difference games being software, first and foremost.
Of course just like Yahtzee said in video about pirating, there is no actual enforcement of how you can use the license of games you bought - but not because they wouldn't want to but rather because it's impossible. You weren't really supposed to lend them for example. There was various attempts(by EA and I think Microsoft too?) to monetize resold games but I am not sure how that worked law-wise, I assume it wasn't strictly fine by terms and conditions.
Game preservation by itself is good and reasonable as it lets you experience past titles and how the medium evolved over time. But due to eventual end of life of physical media ironically digital distribution is better for that. The issue is that there is usually no way to purchase older games. Hard to blame anyone for piracy or emulating when there is no proper, legal way to obtain license to game or buy hardware for it. It's more annoying when companies like Nintendo do their best to put emulators down, while still profiting from them and even selling time-limited digital licenses to their old games. Maybe companies will be eventually forced by law to make previous products easily accessible online, but somehow I doubt that though it'd be the good solution.
Then it's debatable how would average gamer even use the preserved, older versions of games. Sure some people might want to revisit a game from their childhood, but most people will just engage with new releases - as it's hard to blame anyone as there is so much media coming out nowadays - and not just games. If you don't earn living by gaming or just gaming most of your (free) time, there's no real way to keep up just with games. This way I wouldn't think of remakes as replacements, because I genuinely doubt a lot of people who appealed RE4R to or maybe even more recent System Shock remake being better example, would go back to revisit those games. I'd say they are just alternative versions or arguably pretty much different things sharing same name and some basic gameplay or story elements.
Same way you can have 20 modern military shooters under different names being different titles, despite sharing the same common elements. Though I guess this is just Ship of Theseus argument, in a way.
If games were to be considered more stand-alone, then maybe putting them into public domain after 10-20 years would be reasonable and the best solution. Then there are various open-source versions of commercial games built from ground-up by reverse engineering.
Which might be good tip in general - if you want freedom of choice in the future, of having options then you should opt for open-source solutions. Replacing Windows with Linux and such.
Microsoft trying to monetize resold games is one of the reasons the PS4 crushed the Xbox One. Sony even made joke videos about how easy it was to lend a game to a friend off the back of this.
@@MrMikeJJ There was also backlash over the initial plan to have it require a persistent internet connection and the Kinect plugged in order to work, plus have it be always on and listening for commands. Many comparisons to the Telescreens from 1984 were made.
Then a few years later, all those same people put an Amazon Alexa in their living room anyway.
The public domain thing is something I think about a lot as well. Of course passing laws in regards to that would be hell, since it would most likely need to be something global, but having software (or even just games specifically) become open-source after a set amount of time after release would be great for both preservation and for giving people a chance to play something they might not be able to otherwise. That said, I see companies trying all sorts of things in order to find loopholes and keep their games locked out, for example by making them live services forever or something lmao
I mean, you do own your copy of a physical game, there are just restrictions to what you can do with it. Same thing with your car. You own it, doesn't mean you can drive it wherever or however you want.
You still own it, you just can't sell it as your own work. Or, indeed, make duplicates and start distributing those.
That’s why I will die on the physical media hill. Won’t buy a game if it’s digital-only, will wait until it gets a physical like what Baldur’s Gate 3 did or through publishers like Limited Run
1:00 to skip the sponsor.
We need either laws clarifying what a digital purchase is (rent or actual purchase?) or a law saying that when a service that is part of a product is discontinued, it needs to be handed over to the general public.
I want physical copies so I can lend them to mates when I'm done with them - which is another reason publishers are scrapping them
Remember when Microsoft tried to prevent used copies from being a thing? That was and still is a bad decision.
Most of the digital services have family sharing (which doesn't have to be family). It's obviously not quite as free as sharing around a physical copy, but it sure is convenient that you can easily share with someone thats not within convenient driving distance.
@AWanderingSwordsman Steam's family sharing in particular feels significantly more convenient and free than sharing a physical game. Of course Steam and Valve are also strictly digital only, always have been, and always will be.
Oh god “under a killing moon”. I nearly forgot about that. Oh man I want to play that now.
I’m glad that while Konami is often the scum of the earth, even as they gear up to make a remake of MGS3, they give us a classic Metal Gear collection, complete with the first three MGS games and the first two Metal Gear games, and then they’re also throwing in the two inferior metal gear games, which are being listed basically alongside the bonus features, meaning the old good stuff is there and the old shit is still available for preservation purposes because when else would anyone bother making them more available
It's worth noting that if a game is only released digitally, you cannot buy a used copy of it. You will always be subjected to the price on the online store, rather than paying for someone's unwanted disc.
Our attachement to internet is so absolute that I had a very funny and frustrating interaction today related to it. The short version is I had to call to replace the card on file for my ISP because it was decliend and my internet got turned off. Being one of those weird people with a flip phone and desk top computer I got their phone number off the side of my modem and called to update the card. The phone person spent the first 10 minutes trying to talk me into using their online service to update my payment method. I informed her I couldn't which is why I called. She said, "oh no its super easy you just go to our website.." "I can't" "well if you don't know the address I can email a link to you" "i can't access my email." "the online utility is easier and you don't have to wait on hold on the phone" at which point I had to remind her that I had called because my internet had been turned off, that is why I was on the phone with her in the first place. There was a long pause and she said, I kid you not, "well yes but we could reactivate your internet as soon as we get your payment and it would be faster to make your payment online" at which point i hung up, called back,and thankfully got someone that understood why they would have to take my card over the phone.
Yahtzee I agree with you I do, but I think we both know physical disc copies just won't last. There's just not enough incentive on either side to manage it, collectors still get pretty boxes and companies make more money doing digital releases. I will miss it all though.
And that's why I buy on GOG, I actually own those games and can install them on any system regardless of if I lose my account there or not (and I don't need a client).
People keep asking me if I'm excited for the Silent Hill 2 remake because I keep saying how Silent Hill 2 is one of the best games I've ever played.
I tell people I am the opposite of excited for it, because I would much rather a faithful port of the original is brought to availability for modern hardware.
I am a firm believer that these game remakes should come with a port of the original as well, because I truly doubt that the Silent Hill 2 Remake will successfully capture any of what made the original magical, even if the PS2 version has an awful camera and tank controls.
And actually every other reason Yahtzee said also pops up in my mind. If we're trying to preserve art, it needs to be kept intact, warts and all.
Thing is, digital media *should* last forever. A lot longer than the plastic on a disc or the hardware used to run it. The fact that some companies are giving things an artificial lifespan annoys me to no end. So I'm grateful for the people who decompile, who make server emulators, who scan boxart of weird European adventure games that were released in only one country.
"physical copy" is a red herring.
I have DVDs of games I can't play anymore, because they had always-online DRM or were online/multiplayer only to begin with, and all servers were shut down.
Meanwhile I can play my digitally distributed GOG collection (or NES ROMs) just fine by copy-pasting it from old hard drive to a new one once in ~5 years.
Even movies have this issue from time to time! Is it wild that I want to own something that was meaningful to me, and possibly share it with friends and family into the future, even if that studio no longer exists or cares about it!
Share it with them digitally.
@@AWanderingSwordsman show me a digital way to actually own a movie
Yahtzee always takes every opportunity he can to remind us that he didn’t like la noire. Lol.
I grabbed the original RE4 when it was on sale before the remake released just because I was afraid they'd pull the original from sale and I wanted to have the option of playing it as it was. Of course, nearly all my games are digital thanks to having a digital only PS5 and not previously owning a PS4 or corresponding PS4 game discs. I do have the original Kingdoms of Amalur for PC on disc, but I also bought the original on Steam first and then snagged a collector's edition later on. I have the collector's edition of Re-Reckoning as well, but it really did come with just a Steam code rather than a physical disc.
All my other games that I have physical copies of are for my DS Lite or Gameboy Color, which both required physical copies of games for obvious reasons.
While I do worry about my favorite games being unplayable, they're also single-player games (or primarily single-player) and I won't be affected if the servers go offline since I already play them offline. I think it really is a case that if the entirety of the internet goes down we'll all probably have bigger things to worry about than not being able to play our games. That said, when it comes to books, manga, favorite shows/movies, etc, I do buy physical copies of those. I get tired of tech at times and at least I know my books will always work unless they get burned or some shit.
This is why I made GOG my primary store ages ago. People often complain about lack of ownership, but rarely talk about DRM-Free stores. As for the Robot Cache ad, unless you can still sell DELISTED games, that concept is pretty pointless I would argue.
I loved tex murphy games SO MUCH as a kid. Martian Memorandum looked like crap in some places but used some really innovative tricks in others, plus the Noir in Space esthetic was awesome
I know its a small thing but thank you escapist for hearing us out last time about not wanting ads in the middle of the video, if you have to do ads its whatever but thank you for at least putting them in the front and not the middle
Does anyone remember the 2001 Aliens versus Predator 2? Three (great) intertwined campaigns and amazing multiplayer? If you've never heard of it, that might be related to the fact that you can't find it on *any* digital storefront. See, it was made by Monolith but *published* by Sierra (remember them from way back?). While Monolith is still kicking around, Sierra stopped existing over a decade ago. So the rights for the game are...somewhere, maybe languishing in a forgotten filing cabinet. In practical terms, this means the game can no longer be sold and might as well not even exist. It's Lost Media at this point (because of rights issues, mind); if you didn't play it when it came out, you'll never get to.
It's kind of validating to hear Yahtzee weighing in on, as it's something I feel like the solitary weirdo in my circle of friends for worrying about. It's a big reason why I prefer PC gaming above all else: the massive library and ability to play most games in history, either using a disc or emulation. It is worth pointing out, though, that digital distribution (which makes sense, given how many discs some games would require these days) does not necessarily preclude ownership. A storefront like Good Old Games demonstrates this perfectly, letting you buy and download the installation files for your games to do with as you please - arguably the gold standard for digital distribution. In that context, services like Game Pass have my blessing to fill the niche as a complentary and ephemeral experience.
Robot cache still has a bit coin miner within their Downloader. While it isn't currently active, they have the ability to turn it on at any time.
The reason gamers’ desire for physical games is fought so much is the people who actually make them now are McDonalds execs riding the CEO chair and the notion of doing something for art or preservation sake is so alien it might as well be in another language.
Digital copies are arguably easier to preserve than physical ones so this makes no sense. Like, find me a game thats older than 15 years old that you can't easily pirate. You can't. It's all preserved online.
@@AWanderingSwordsman The thing is, the ones about 15ish years ago or 20 are the ones that need that preservation. I don't care about Ubisofts latest excuse to print money, but Shadow Hearts, Soul Caliburs 1-3, Saints Row, Koudelka - Blazing Dragons? Those are all parts of companies that have gone belly-up and still on the rights but don't bother to put out copies. Thy are lost to time and eBay.
@@mesektet5776but again, it’s quite easy to pirate all of them.
@@mesektet5776 Maybe you misread but I said all the games from 15 years+ ago are preserved completely. I challenge you to find a single one that is unable to be emulated. All of the ones you mentioned for instance can be emulated. It's all perfectly preserved and immune to scarcity in a way old physical media isn't.
@@AWanderingSwordsman I have yet to find any of my beloved Shadow Hearts games. I’ve never heard of it emulated and Midway was carved up into so many pieces I doubt any of the property dragons will even check their hoards for it, much less ever use it.
as a personal rule, i only buy a game if it has an offline, single-player mode and comes on a physical copy. it's...kinda limiting my options this generation, if i'm being honest. more and more games on my shelf are imports or previous-gen versions because they were my only options.
...also i may need to check that game out and add it to the backlog. thanks, yahtzee.
Top shelf licker, dude. I could never find some thread for a video game about rediscovering your life through a ghola-style reincarnation element in a Dead Island setting, but reading through Durarara threads changed my life. And there was that sweet moment popping in on D
I think that something missing from the conversation is that some games have what is essentially a limited life span… my examples is Star Wars Galaxies a Game I bought the collector edition for and never got to play for one reason or another and eventually it ceased to exist and now all that is left are memories… can you imagine if the Godfather Trilogy you only had a certain amount of years to watch it and the all the copies exploded …
Piracy can't be stealing if paying for it isn't owning.
"looking like photos pasted on spoons". Thank you for that 😂
Game preservation is a hot and valuable topic! Video games are art and we need to ensure that they can be enjoyed down the line, even if that's not going to make the publishers or investors gobs of dough like a hack job remake would
Pirates and emulators are unironically the pioneers of game preservation, there is nothing illegal about downloading a DRM free copy of a game you already bought but lost the disk to or it never had a disk to begin with (or can't be bought anymore)
Private servers for MMOs also serve a similar purpose preserving the even more ephemeral MMO games that are always under the threat of disappearing without a trace once their official servers shutdown for good....ahoy mates.
On a more serious note, for someone who prouds himself of being anti-corporate it's utterly bizzare and cognitively dissonant to mindlessly be trusting of some of the most corrupt callous greedy corporations in humsn history who knowingly gave people cancer just because they didn't bother putting a fucking warning label on the goddamn carcinogenic baby powder or sunscreen.
And despite losing their cases they still laugh their way to the bank regularly because some condesending people are so ideologically brainwashed by the soulless talking heads in mainstream media who are funded by the same exact corporations that they refuse to entertain the idea that their deeply entrenched belief was utter horse shit and that they have been lied to all this time or even that two things could be true at the same time...OH, NO no no.. they instead go..."WE are the smart educated ones, we aren't like those stupid unwashed other guys over there who take horse medicine, harumph"
I have the weird experience that the only physical games I think I've bought in the last 8+ years are titles for my Switch Lite, and that's due to its abysmal memory capacity. I understand the theoretical risks of Steam collapsing into a black hole, but it's just a lot more convenient to get games there, plus indie studios often just don't have the spare budget to make those physical copies. My current PC doesn't even have a disk drive, and I have yet to encounter a problem with that fact. It's just the way tech has moved.
Robot Alchemic Drive, aka R.A.D; is a goddamn classic, with voice acting that is just... Perfect. And it deserves to be remembered! Remembered, remastered; re-released, and remade! With Big O/Roger Smith dlc! Because that would be amazing! And it's the perfect game for it! Let us pilot Big O! 😭
I have a copy of R.A.D.
That was so cool how y'all had Kenneth from 30 Rock on the intro! What a cameo
The issue isn't physical vs. digital, because there are physical games that require you to always be online (and regardless of your connection strength, those servers will go down someday), and digital games can be preserved very easily; the issue is DRM. Buying a game from Steam is renting it; buying a game from GOG is owning it. The reason people still cling to physical for preservation is because on consoles, it's hard to impossible to preserve digital games; it's totally different on PC.
Remember the GTA3 trilogy? Yeah, that remastering sure preserved the original well, didn't it
I knida wish that more PC games were still available in Physical form. And if you don't have DVD/Blue Ray drive then you could still activate a code & download the game. Also it would be awesome if multi-platform would be a basic standard instead of exclusivity (you buy a game, a license and it is up to you what platform you want to play on). Exclusivity in the long term is the worst as it makes it impossible to play older games. If a game was not ever released on PC and the platform it was made on is dead - then the only way is to emulate it - assuming that physical copy was released at some point. I think there were some Nintendo Wii or Wii U games that were digital store only, and since those stores are offline for a long time - there is no way to obtain a copy, as you can not buy used one or download .iso file.
About physical disks and theoretically using it 100 years later: physical media fails all the time. HDDs fail with mean time of 4-5 years, CD-ROMs have a good chance of failure after 10 years (not that we should ever go back to CDs). Sure, we can achieve longer times to failure by not using the media but I don’t think games should only be “theoretically” playable.
What we should really have the capability for is true archiving - to allow copying for redundancy and regeneration of data. This stands in opposition to DRM which does not like copying data. I get why devs want DRMs but they are so obnoxiously bad.
Perhaps a compromise can be that collectors editions can be DRM free and allows copying. Or, perhaps DRMs can expire based on console lifetimes (eg 10 years). Then again, companies (eg Nintendo) monetize their 20+ year old games, and these companies would feel threatened by such archives and not comply.
Whatever happened to French courts deciding that Steam has to grant you ownership of a game you buy, thus allowing you to sell it. The story came up a few years ago and Steam immediately went to appeal the decision. Heard nothing ever since
The comedy in this episode on a super serious topic...Probably the best yet.
This is why I find the PC port important to game preservation, I have a ton of old game discs, but a hard drive is much more simple to future proof. Now I can hold on to the Persona collection without needing to hold on to the PS Vita I never bought. The only problem is Nintendo refuses to use PC or even rerelease most games after N64 era in a virtual capacity, so yes piracy is a necessity for preservation. I just wanted to play Fire Emblem Radiance series without breaking the bank on second hand discs.
I'm a student getting Library Information Sciences Masters and this is the area I want to focus in. I did some research into present video game preservation and the issue is worse than you may think. Older games are easier to preserve largely because of the simplicity of the platforms they are on, at least simple in comparison to modern day platforms. Emulation came up in my research and the 'newer' games have not yet been emulated due to the complexities of platforms they're on. I believe it's PS3 and onward. Additionally to this, when academic research is conducted in the area, academics often go to the fans of the games for much of their research. Surveys have even confirmed that developers and publishers care little for preservation, with at least one developer saying, "preservation is a job for the fans." If there's a property you're remotely interested in and may want to play it at a later date then you may want to consider other avenues to acquiring it.
Not all hope is lost as a few professionals have recognized that this is a pressing issue. The people at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) run more of an archive than a museum. MADE has a very special exemption to copyright law as well. They are allowed to preserve anything and everything. However, none of the material they preserve can be circulated beyond the doors of their facility. You can visit the museum and play the original Mario Bros on original console, controller, and even CRT, but none of that can be checked out. Since this is an issue I am passionate about, I'm going to go post this on the Escapist as well.
Shout out for persona for making a remaster of Persona 3 as well as simply re-releasing persona 3 on steam. You get the past as well as the upgraded version. Another similar-ish idea was how the halo 1 remaster enabled quick toggling between the old and remastered graphics. I had so much fun comparing them.
I think it should be common practice to release a direct re-release alongside remakes, hell even put them in the same CD or download.
I agree with Yatz pretty frequently. But this is the first time I have agreed 110%. I feel so validated.
"Oh, Yahtzee, stop grousing!"
"NO, YAHTZEE, KEEP GROUSING! YOU'RE RIGHT!"
Eh. Speaking as someone who used to be hardcore physical, the ship has sailed on this.
In the case of PC games, it sailed 20 years ago. Sure, I managed to get a copy of Duke Nukem Forever and Starcraft 2 (The first two chapters anyway.) but those were Events. The first was a game that I never thought would actually come out so I wanted a physical copy to commemorate it The second (terran) was Starcraft 2 which was both an event piece and the lore book inside was worth the purchase. The Zerg box was solely because, as a Zerg player, I had searched until I could find the Zerg box for the first one (which I then got rid of in a move) and I felt the need to do that for Starcraft 2 as an homage to my youth.
As for consoles, that's taken longer and had a rocky start but the ship has sailed on that as well. Some of that was lootboxes. After getting Gears 4, it was just easier to rebuy it as a digital copy so I could log in every day and get my bounty/scrap than constantly changing discs. Most of it was just convenience and a sensing of how the winds had shifted. We went into the PSWii60 stating that we will never abandon physical. By the end, PSN/XBLI/XBA games as well as DLC had been deemed perfectly acceptable. By the end of the XBOX One/Switch/PS4, it's considered weird to get it physically. Less than 2% of my games are physical these days. The ones that are were there because of:
1) Not realizing how much the market had shifted at the beginning of Xbox One.
2) Commemoration games
3) Limited Storage on the Switch.
(Going to break this into two posts.)
Another reason to keep banging the drum of how badly we need copyright reform. None of this would be a problem if copyright was more sensible, if intellectual property had a short life that fit the realities of the modern age, only the newest works were outside the public domain and we’d be able to reprint as many copies of Silent Hill 2 as we’d like. And maybe get Silent Hill games that didn’t suck.