Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions • Hacker News Board

Re: Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

#91

Post by smcin » Sun, May 11, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

smcin wrote: post #78

awkwardpotato wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they're also currently $2 billion dollars in debt and are attempting to split into 3 separate companies. "Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends" - The legal successor to Embracer. For their triple A studios and major ip rights (they currently own the rights to LOTR-based games) "Coffee Stain & Friends" - For their indie studios. (Named after their most successful indie studio, the people behind Goat Simulator and S…

Embracer acquired Asmodee 12/2021, made a spree of other debt-funded accquisitions packaged and prepped to sell the whole company to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund in 2022, but that deal fell through in 2023 and Embracer reportedly incurred €2 billion losses, laid off 8% of 17,000 Asmodee employees, then subsequently spun Asmodee out (now the board and card game unit) saddled with €900m Euro debt to pay off Embracer…

Also I should have given more prominent mention of this site which IMO is more worthy and actionable than Wingefors' private physical archive:

https://delistedgames.com/

"Welcome to Delisted Games, a growing archive of 2,163 games you can't play" from game console libraries, Steam, etc. ("the town criers of video game disappearances... We research, catalog, and inform about today’s digital gaming landscape (hellscape) including store delistings, online service shutdowns and, simply put, cultural erasure").

(mentioned on HN previously in connection with the PS4 debacle [0]).

I mean there's a legitimate discussion to be had about game lifecycles and between Steam, Kickstarter, games publishers, video game consoles, value resellers like GOG, HumbleBundle, about what are more transparent, ethical ways to publish(/unpublish) and monetize games throughout their lifecycle, to different constituencies of player:

- early adopters/ alpha playtesters, who are happy with the tradeoff of a buggy and incomplete game they can play online with friends in return for a deep discount, early access, the ability to positively influence game devpt, maybe some swag or convention events

- beta playtesters, who expect a reasonably complete and stable game, an active community, forums, developers who are reponsive, regular (monthly/quarterly) bug rollups and fixes, etc.

- main-phase, who are happy to pay full price for a complete, bug-free game with tutorials, user guides, multilanguage online help, forums, etc., and have an expectation that they can quickly start an online multplayer/remote game with friends, strangers and AI.

- owners who still expect a basic post-lifecycle ability to play a game solo or against AI or other existing owners (after the publisher has disappeared or the game site has taken down infrastructure servers, achievements, forums, etc.) Such as happened with 'Pandemic' and Asmodee.

- to what extent should publishers be able to use exclusivity to lock in owners and extract revenues? what happens to digital rights after the monetizing is over? Can they retroactively convert a sale to a licensing (time-limited, region-locked, limited rights to play with friends and family...)? This is something where consumer law and regulators can limit bad behavior.

As a positive example of how to do this profitably and ethically, Civilization (Sid Meier Games/ Firaxis Games).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25134263

Re: Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

#92

Post by johnnyjeans » Mon, May 12, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

DocTomoe wrote: post #80

johnnyjeans wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. I have very little respect for artists with sentimentality over such trivial bullshit. Speaking as someone who makes games. The jewel case doesn't matter. It detracts from the thing-itself, like a showroom car that travels everywhere in a hermetically sealed container. That's not a car anymore, it's waste. Just because it gets driven 5 miles a year doesn't change shit. If someones spending money to preserve my…

You may not have experienced gaming in the 1980s and 1990s. Games back then were more than just a stream of bits. They had physical maps (sometimes on cloth, not paper). They had actual manuals (and many of them were art in itself). Disks were in strange, unusual colors, later CDs had shapes, or hidden audio tracks. I vividly remember a copy-protection scheme of black, slightly shiny ink on black paper to prevent pho…

You correctly intuit that I am young, but I do have a lot of experience with that era of games. They could be reliably played on any shitbox I could commandeer in high school (early 2010s.)

Thus I've cut through a laundry list of silver and golden age cRPGs (and other genres, of course) with cute copy protection and complex manuals. Often times the relevant information was included as a text file (maybe not in the same format it came in), sometimes the copy protection was patched right out of the game (the Scene in the 20th century was just that crazy.) I never particularly cared. I was there for the game, not the auxiliary accoutrements. To some degree I understand the sentimentality and attachment if you grew up with the tactile materials accompanying the game. That being said, I don't feel like my experience of Ultima 3 was lessened because I lacked the cloth map any more than I feel like my experience of Wasteland was ruined because I could ctrl+f the copy protection challenges.

Re: Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

#93

Post by Jolter » Sat, May 17, 2025, 6:45 PM UTC

kouteiheika wrote: post #65

Jolter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical archives have literally worked for thousands of years. You do have a point in that commercial ventures like Embracer don’t tend to last for very long. Presumably the collection would not be auctioned off piecemeal if the company goes under, but rather sold as a unit to some other entity.

No, the OP is right, although perhaps for the wrong reasons. In a 100 (or a few hundred) years none of the games from that physical archive will be playable, as both the physical media and the physical consoles needed to play those games will become unusable. Physical archives work only as long as the physical medium itself lasts. The only way to actually preserve games is to digitize them. Period. Collecting physica…

I know you’re right, but my intuition is that there are not a huge number of games in that collection which have never been dumped to digital.

I see some value in preserving the physical artifacts. These games are not only the medium and its content. Most have boxes with artwork, many have manuals, even “feelies”. If all we had was archive.org then those would be lost to the sands of time.

Re: Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

#94

Post by danparsonson » Sun, May 18, 2025, 1:34 PM UTC

DocTomoe wrote: post #82

danparsonson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think maybe someone might knock their copy of Captain Comic off its pedastal and break it?

See, here's the thing: Archives do not have pedestals - they use archival storage. This may come in different forms, but to the uninitiated eye, it often looks a lot like narrow pathways between storage shelves, with labeled cardboard boxes, which may contain, in acid-free paper, sometimes with foam inlays - objects. Archives exist to preserve what is there, not to show it off. Sometimes, that's for future scientific…

My misunderstanding， sorry - I was imagining this as an online archive that was closed to the public, hence the apparent absurdity of it. The only thing wrong that day was my brain.