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GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

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Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#71

Post by rendaw »

paxys wrote: post #42
freedomben wrote: post #7

Emphasis added: > The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights , fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original. It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the com…

That's how copyright law works. There's no "use it or lose it" provision. Once you create something it is yours, and others only get rights to it 70-100+ years later.

I don't understand your reply. GP didn't claim that the law said otherwise.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#72

Post by temp84858696945 »

observationist wrote: post #67
1980phipsi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.

It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing. Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media. Make…

I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market.

There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.

I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.

Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#73

Post by bombcar »

temp84858696945 wrote: post #72
observationist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing. Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media. Make…

I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market. There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free. I think video games…

I think the sales of books is pretty much uncoupled from the supply or price, as piles and piles of great books are available for free online or at the local library.

More recorded shows exist than any one man can watch in a lifetime, and yet there are multiple concurrent series ongoing right now.

I think the real kicker is that IP law was built around things like books, that don't suddenly stop working or need to be maintained, etc. Modern laws should take software into account and deal with it differently.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#74

Post by bombcar »

zimpenfish wrote: post #70
observationist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing. Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media. Make…

> 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing. If that were true of music, companies wouldn't be buying back catalogues for (upwards of) hundreds of millions[0][1]. [0] https://apnews.com/article/music-catalog-sales-pop-rock-kiss... [1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ranked-biggest-music-catal...

If it were modified to "99% of media has commercial profit collected within five years" it's probably pretty close to the mark, given how much is released and never reprinted/etc.

However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#75

Post by bombcar »

pjc50 wrote: post #20
freedomben wrote: post #7

Emphasis added: > The GOG Preservation Program is our ongoing effort to save classic games from being lost to time. That means working to secure rights , fixing compatibility so they run hassle-free on modern systems, and even rebuilding missing features so the experience is the best you can get, while staying true to the original. It still baffles me how the "rights" to a game (or any IP) can be a thing when the com…

This is related to "cadastral mapping" in real estate law systems. IP does not have such a map, or indeed any map at all. At best you might find a (no longer obligatory!) copyright notice on it saying who originally owned the rights to something. That doesn't work when the rights get sold. There's no good way to even ask "who owns this?" for a piece of IP other than the highly inadequate and risky approach of just pi…

For software at least, something akin to real estate may be needed long-term if you want to codify it, allowing adverse possession if you pay the taxes, etc.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#76

Post by WorldMaker »

egypturnash wrote: post #34

Honestly I find GOG's whole mission of "update old games for modern Windows" kinda weird when I compare it to what people who want to play old console games do: they just fire up an emulator . Running a virtual Windows machine sounds like a much easier solution than individually patching every crusty old executable to run on the modern OS, and re-patching every single one of them when MS rolls out yet another new gra…

GOG uses emulators as well. GOG has a share of games that use Dosbox or ScummVM as two somewhat common emulators they will configure a game to run in that I'm aware of.

That said, there's also something to be said that if a game is patchable, there is some value in patching it to run directly rather than "need" an emulator.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#77

Post by observationist »

bombcar wrote: post #74
zimpenfish wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing. If that were true of music, companies wouldn't be buying back catalogues for (upwards of) hundreds of millions[0][1]. [0] https://apnews.com/article/music-catalog-sales-pop-rock-kiss... [1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ranked-biggest-music-catal...

If it were modified to "99% of media has commercial profit collected within five years" it's probably pretty close to the mark, given how much is released and never reprinted/etc. However, even 1% of a very large market is a huge tail, which is valuable.

Regardless, change the game. If you have a valuable, useful platform, and compete with other platforms for quality and delivery of service, then you're optimizing for the right things. If you have valuable media and the platform only serves to collect fees for the privilege of accessing the media, then you're optimizing the thing that is net negative for society, and ends up with adtech and degraded service and gotchanomics to try to nickel and dime you at every opportunity.

Imagine a world in which spotify and youtube and netflix had to compete on product and service quality, instead of network effects and legal technicalities. In which you could vibe code an alternative platform and have it be legally feasible to start your own streaming service merely by downloading a library of public domain content, then boot-strapping your service and paying new studios for license to run content, and so on.

The entire ecosystem would have to adapt, and it would be incredibly positive for creatives and authors and artists. There wouldn't be a constant dark cloud of legal consequences hanging over peoples heads, with armies of lawyers whose only purpose in life is to wreck little people who dare "infringe" on content, and all the downstream nonsense that comes from it.

Make society better by optimizing the policies that result in fewer, less wealthy, and far less powerful lawyers.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#78

Post by lenocinor »

izacus wrote: post #61
qwertfisch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed. I’m still wondering where the co-founder got the 25M dollars. Also if he just had separated GOG (and buy his shares) before CDPR going public in 2009, it would have been much cheaper. At that time GOG only was a plattform for good old games.

> I’m still wondering where the co-founder got the 25M dollars. From sales of millions upon millions of copies of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 games?

Indeed. I regularly have to remind myself that The Witcher 3 is 8th on Wikipedia’s list of all-time best-selling video games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#79

Post by vanderZwan »

freehorse wrote: post #55
xnorswap wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were a real preservation effort, they could set up a charitable foundation for computer game preservation, and encourage donations to that.

But either case we talk about commercial products. The games are still copyrighted commodities to be sold. I assume they get licensed by the copyright holders to update them and sell them in gog. I do not see how a "charity"-based process would make sense or be honest here.

What are you talking about? Charities can sell products, they're just not supposed to make a profit, so all profits would have to go back into preservation.

I mean we can go off on a tangent about why IKEA should not get away with being registered as a charity, but as long as GoG is not doing tax evasion I don't see the problem.

Re: GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive

#80

Post by jeditobe »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #57
egypturnash wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really I'm surprised nobody's done "WinBox" yet. Proton kinda covers that except it runs in Linux, not Windows. I dunno how it handles old Windows games as I've got zero nostalgia for those, my Steam Deck mostly runs modern stuff from small teams.

ReactOS has been around for 20+ years. You can run some old games on it, but it's hardly at the level of WINE and projects based on it.

30 years ^)
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