The Preservation Paradox | Cold Take
Added 2024-01-01 18:06:11 +0000 UTCHappy New Year!
Our first video of the new year is now available taking a look at video game preservation with Frost!
Comments
This has nothing to do with games, strictly speaking, but I've been in the IT world long enough to know that you never, ever, ever trust Microsoft.
Blandon Ray - metaldirtnskin
2024-01-04 00:28:02 +0000 UTCI'm ashamed to say it took me this long to find Cold Take, I have yet to find a better, more honest critique of the gaming industry, and gamers in equal measure.
1LitTrashPanda
2024-01-02 16:05:27 +0000 UTCSometime around 2017 Microsoft removed Platinum Games' Legend of Korra from the Xbox 360 store. It was the first time I realized we don't actually own any of our games from that generation of consoles forward. AAA games certainly isn't going to give up control over access to their games, so any sort of decentralized archiving of games is going to be led by indie devs.
GreenForge
2024-01-02 15:54:29 +0000 UTCUnfortunately, I find piracy is probably the best option. After the 3ds store was shut off I jailbroke my 3ds for a couple of reasons. First was that Nintendo wouldn’t receive any money no matter how I played the games: no digital purchases would work and even if I did track down a physical copy second hand, I wasn’t exactly going to send Nintendo £30 or whatever. The other reason is that there were a few games, namely Phoenix Wright 4/5 and Fire Emblem Fates (3 games in one, each needing a different cart for the most part, with only a special edition having part 3 not as DLC) that were either completely or practically impossible to play without piracy. Many other games would easily got the same way unless Capcom etc. deigns to once more grace us with their presence. So I say buy games for the console while you can but also save those ROMs for when the console (or PC potentially) goes away.
Tim Wilson
2024-01-02 13:51:41 +0000 UTCLike a Public Domain for games?
Carly
2024-01-01 19:35:20 +0000 UTCJust as a note, I liked the camera work when you put on the pirate outfit. I'm a fan of lingering shots with more going on in them and I appreciated that the only way to get a clear idea of what you were wearing was seeing the hat in the mirror. The digital vs physical preservation debate's one of the few things I can definitively say has two sides with valid points to make. Physical consoles are harder to maintain for the average, everyday person, but digital is a lot easier to remove access to. Physical games always go for more than digital games when the physical media is no longer produced but digital games are a lot more easily enforced by companies that want to protect their IPs. If I had to pick a side though, I'd say that digital is superior to physical for one incredibly unfair and unreasonable factor: disk drives can't read disks fast enough to actually run the game at an acceptable level for AAA game devs. Physical disks function as keys for the game that you just bought, which is downloaded onto the hard drive and read from there. You're not downloading a 60 GB update for that physical disk you just bought, you're downloading the game onto your console so the game can run it faster while your disk acts as a "true/false" statement for ownership. But if we're looking for an "answer" to the question of games preservation though, I do think the closest we'll ever get is PC. Just making it legal to emulate games that are older than a certain number of years or even aren't available to legally purchase firsthand anywhere would do wonders for preservation of games. A multitude of companies would never allow it but we managed to get the government to preserve certain films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" in the National Film Registry so it's not a given that we can't preserve games in some fashion.
Ryallen
2024-01-01 18:53:12 +0000 UTCWhat we need is a digital preservation system, an online library of game code and reasonable emulators so that future generations can see what we made and how we made it. Whether or not that will be legal is up to the suits—but gaming as an art form should have museums.
MDO
2024-01-01 18:24:49 +0000 UTC
