It would be interesting for copyright law to require client/server source code escrow for games before they would be protected under the law, with abandonware automatically becoming open source.
Why old games never die, but new ones do
111–120 of 335 posts
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#112We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.) The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it. Copyright and patents encourage creation and inventio…
Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
Because it doesn’t bring money anymore anyway. Nobody wins by it being unavailable anymore.
Unless you consider “if they won’t play original, they would want to buy my flashy, shitty copy instead” a sound strategy.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#113Games are like songs. The songs played on the radio are the bad ones from this year, together with the great ones from any time in history.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, how many old games do people really remember and keep playing? Maybe a hundred? 2 hundred? That's out of tens of thousands of games.
Gonna go out on a limb and claim that 0 people are still playing Madame Fifi's Whorehouse [1] [1] https://www.solutionarchive.com/game/id,5170/Madam+Fifi's+Wh...
Well now i gotta find a way to play this
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#115We're lacking a middle ground in copyright law that would allow people to play Mario Bros 3 on the NES for free, but doesn't give everyone the right to use the Mario IP, or to resell it en masse. (It's only possible right now because of incomplete law enforcement.) The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation, but rent-seeking on a decades old game is not it. Copyright and patents encourage creation and inventio…
Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
Why not?
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
Outside of computer games, there are plenty of games that have died off because the communities to play them no longer exist or the rules have been forgotten. Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
Counterstrike 1, released 25 years ago, averages around 10,000 players 'online' at any given moment, pretty much exclusively for team based multiplayer [1]. That makes it more popular (by active player count) than e.g. Hogwart's Legacy. Most modern games not only really fail to bring anything new to the table, but often feel like the overall gameplay is general decline. For instance the gunplay in Counterstrike still "feels" much better than many modern shooters.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#117The article kinda dances around this point, but I think the largest reason "old games never die" is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation. Similar to the lindy effect[0] where shows that had been around a while were likely to stay around a while longer. The are the games good enough for people to host fan servers and make mods, and behind each good game there is a lot of forgotten stuf…
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
That's not actually true.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#118The Article forgot to mention that Counter Strike started as a Half Life Mod. And I remember friends playing UT mods more than the base game.
I’m not very happy with gaming in 2025. I’m more a console gamer because the whole custom configuration to get the best FPS/visuals is distracting me from playing. I mean I’m the problem there. So I liked to stick to consoles with their easy setup. But with the PS4 Pro that changed. Now I had to choose again: Performance vs Visuals. My answer was always: I want both! I went back to a PC in 2020 and hated it. I spend an arm and leg for the parts and never had the feeling I got much out of the machine (that’s what you get if you try to build a workstation/gaming rig hybrid) So it’s mostly my fault why PC gaming sucks for me. But there is one huge reason why I went this route: Cost. I refuse to pay north of $3000 for a high end gaming rig to play games on it. Just that. I mean what else would a 3800/4800 do in my PC. And consoles? Well they’re heading the same way. I payed the 500 for the PS5 and also XBox Series X. Both together were cheaper as a GPU at the time. But the PS5 Pro feels like a ripoff. And I understand that I could built a more cost effective mid range PC that smokes these newer consoles. But my joy in gaming is not building the hardware or checking latest test on gamers nexus etc. I want to play games.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#119This is an article about survivor bias in the end. It has a lot of explanation for reasons old games never die and new games come and fade out. The truth is a lot of old games disappeared we just don’t really remember them. It was also a much much smaller market. As a percentage more survived because there were more as a ratio of paying players. Certainly some of these reasons matter but maybe not as much as simply s…
From the article: "Many new games come and go, and oftentimes nowadays the servers are pulled leaving the games unplayable or crippled. Most notably, this has led to a “stop killing games” campaign in the EU and other countries; where people get tired of buying games only for them to be unplayable when the developer yanks the servers leaving no way to play this game anymore."
Too bad I don't think they'll reach the necessary signatures. They're currently at 44% of the required signatures, and the collection in ending in July.
I don't know how to spread the word about it...
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#120Speaking of "Stop Killing Games" : https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/70-of-games-with-online-req... (Community-gathered data ! Spreadsheets !)
I'm afraid they won't reach the necessary signatures; currently it sits at 44% of the required signatures. There's not much time left, the collection is ending in about 60 days.