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Why old games never die, but new ones do

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Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#71
post #20

The 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.

beware of using old cd though, the older it is the higher risk it'll shatter and damage the unit.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#72
post #69
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does reading EPUB files from a non-Amazon source stop Amazon from yanking your Amazon purchases?

I hypothetically did a few things to back up my Kindle book collection and read them with KOReader Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.

I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that...

If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#73
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would put focus in the survivorship bias too. He is looking and the survivors, and trying to figure out why they survived, and not the ones that didn't make it and could had some the same strengths, but still are not around anymore (and not even counted as "old games"). You have MAME and other console emulators with thousands of games, but how much of them are present on today's culture?

I think you missed the point. This isn't about which games we culturally care to keep. It's that even beloved games from 10 years ago are effectively gone to use because there's no way to break the DRM or resurrect live services to phone home to.

[deleted]

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#74
Old games never die because they are well supported with third party piracy tools. Keygens, Cracked exe's etc. And also third party development to maintain compatibility.

Mechwarrior 2 has a whole VM to keep it going. Lucas Arts games too with ScummVM. Also DREAMM is coming down the pipe.

Daggerfall and Morrowind have been reimplemented in Unity.

WoW has Mangos.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#76
post #49
post #20

Earlier 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.

Like for example you can play every GameCube game that was ever released for the system. There's readily available archives you can download and well-known console mods available to play them. This kind of thing just isn't possible for newer games. Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.

Older DRM is more commonly cracked because there’s more time to crack it. Though the arms race has grown way more sophisticated from the supply side

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#77
post #72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hypothetically did a few things to back up my Kindle book collection and read them with KOReader Hypothetically of course, because breaking DRM is a crime and I would never commit any crimes.

I have hypothetically done the same thing, but it didn't require switching reader software, which is why I didn't understand how the switch to KOReader was connected to that... If all you want to do is read EPUBs you purchased from somewhere else, there's easier ways than jailbreaking and switching to KOReader.

I don’t really like having to convert EPUBs to mobi. I have had issues with Calibre breaking formatting back when I used a Kindle DX in like 2011. I am sure it’s better at conversion now, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, so I like being able to immediately drop the EPUBs into a custom folder and point KOReader.

Additionally, KOReader is pretty nice in its own right, like being able to use any arbitrary TTF font and custom sleep screen images and wireless sync with Calibre.

It was admittedly also just a fun thing to do on a Saturday since it was so easy. I ended up jailbreaking my wife’s and sister in law’s as well since once I figured it out it took like twenty minutes, most of it just waiting for reboots.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#78
post #19

The 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…

Are you saying you don't fire up Action 52 every few days?

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#79

For several years in my city, you could buy a bootleg arcade board with multiple Nintendo games on it and Amazon would deliver it within 2 hours. For fun, every now and then, I’d report these to the Nintendo legal email address. Absolutely nothing would happen. But as soon as Kotaku mentioned a rom hack… gone.

I bought a flashcart for someone’s old DS off Amazon, read all about how to load Wood. Was pleasantly surprised to find it already came flashed with hundreds of games.

Re: Why old games never die, but new ones do

#80

The 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…

Also known as “survivorship bias” [1]

Self-hosted servers and mods may have been the property that made them longed-lived, or maybe it was an emergent property of being long-lived.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

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