Honestly this article lost me right at the start. How can anyone in their right mind think that every Newer Game production works that way and only lists the worst examples of the AAA industry when in fact there are many smaller studios and even indigames rival sales of the biggest studios with mod support and no microtransactions? I just feel like the person hasn't really played any newer non AAA games. Then he goes on to make really uniform claims about integrated graphics today, which quite literally are able to play the newest Call of Duty. It just strikes me as a rage opinion post, which has some underlying truths but overall is just poorly researched.
Why old games never die, but new ones do
151–160 of 335 posts
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should everyone have the right to play NES games for free?
Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation? Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain. Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” i…
It's proof enough about the damage IP law did to culture to see current major American cultural artifacts being 50 year old star wars and even older Marvel comics. That's what current teenager's grandfathers watched.
Like WH40k emperor, the American mass culture is a rotting corpse propped up by copyright law owned by megacorps. Any reformation would force the companies to compete and create new things again.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There's a copy available on the Internet Archive [1].
1. https://archive.org/details/d64_Madam_Fifis_Whore-House_Adve...
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#154Earlier 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.
Agreed, I can speak to any number of second or third tier multiplayer games in the 90s/2000s that had an initially active multiplayer community that slowly dwindled away.
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#155The 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…
One of the things about the Angry Videogame Nerd that I enjoyed when he first came out (yeah, I'm that old) is that back in the mid-2000s, there was a lot of NES nostalgia, but it tended to focus on big-ticket games that were considered "good" -- Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. -- and shared experiences like blowing on cartridges. The AVGN showcased that there were also a lot of forgotten not-so-great games…
City of Heroes is actually back. Several of the community servers have a license from the publisher.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn’t old art be permitted into the public domain to encourage improvement and innovation? Draconian Mickey Mouse copyright law has likely stifled more innovation that we could possibly imagine. Much like patent law there should be a strict, non-renewable period where a company can recoup their cost and make profit. Then it is introduced to the public domain. Not “allowing people to play NES games for free” i…
Is Mario art? Putting that question aside: why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time? Why are their wishes at best secondary? Now, to be clear: I am pro-emulation. If someone is no longer selling a game, I see no ethical problem with pirating it. I don't, however, think anyone has a right to the game simply by virtue of it existing. And you can shar…
> why should an artist be required to make their creations free for anyone to use after a certain period of time?
If it’s digital it’s free by default, even protected IP that isn’t digital is often cheap to copy or substantially replicate
So a better question is, why should people be prevented from making copies of things they like at their own expense forever?
The rights we give creators over their creations are not fundamental rights, they’re legal rights given because society decides the positives (incentivising creation, enabling creation to be an industry) outweigh the negatives (artificially restricting the flow of information, reducing and gatekeeping access to valuable art and knowledge, etc.).
There’s no particular reason to believe that the optimal solution here is either a complete lack of “IP” protection or giving creators absolute control and exclusivity in perpetuity.
It’s almost certainly neither, but IMO it’s quite clearly much less protection than creators currently enjoy.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#157> It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop.
Lol. Don't agree with the premise. Alan Wake 2 is a masterpiece as is Outer Wilds.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#158The 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…
>is simply the old games mentioned were the good ones of their generation.
I don't buy this. Yes obviously there's a survivorship bias but here's some of the most popular games of 1998 alone, from memory:
Ocarina of Time, Half Life, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Starcraft, RE 2, Mario Party, Baldurs Gate
Almost 30 years later we still play franchise spin-offs and remakes off these games, half of them invented entire genres. The year before that, Golden Eye, FF 7, etc. It's not just that those are the good games people remember, they're so dominant in our culture when you ask someone what their favorite game right now is they're likely to say Baldurs Gate 3 or a remake of FF 7.
If you go forward ten, fifteen years with the exception of FromSoftware and the Souls games, I don't think anything has made remotely as much of an impact as even one or two games listed above.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#159Earlier 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.
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.
This is a good point. I'm still looking for a good way for my kids to play mindrover on windows 11, and I haven't found one.
Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do
#160Earlier 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.
One of my favorite time killers [0] on airplanes is no longer in the Apple App Store. It's still in Steam, but it looks like the developer let his website expire, and Apple culled his app.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165