Companies Don't Want You Playing Classic Games

[Dave The Man]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyhsZE6QIJ4

[think positive]

Interesting. Didn’t watch it all, but it does remind me of my favourite game from my very first pc! It was a space pinball game! It wasn’t on the next one, I even put 98 on a partition to play it but it didn’t work the same!

I’m old school stick to my favourites, I put Hercules on my laptop but haven’t played much. For play station etc I just love crash bandicoot games! I have 2 games on my iPad I play during adds or boredom! One is no longer supported so when I get to the end that’s it!

It’s a bit sad for sure, like movies thereis always timeless classics

[stui magpie]

I watched it all, thanks Dave. It's a very messy issue, I read something a while ago about this. There's lots of moving parts here.

There's the copyright laws, that companies own the rights to the games, there's potential royalties that would have to be paid to original producers/creaters of games if they were made available again, there's the mergers and acquisitions of companies and then there's pure greed.

The companies want people buying new consoles and new games, whether in hard copy or digital. Everytime Playstation brings out a new console, it isn't backward compatible so you can't play you old games on the new console.

Something similar is what the Streaming TV companies are starting to do with exclusive content. If Netflix for example commissions an exclusive move or series for their platform, as long as it is up on their platform and being streamed, they have to pay royalties or some such to the creators. Not sure 100% how it works, so once movies or series pass a certain point, some of them are taking them down off the platform so no more royalties.

Now these were made exclusively for that platform, so if they take them down, they're gone. You won't see them on FTA TV, on a different platform and you can't (legally) buy a DVD, they won't be in film or TV libraries, they're gone.

The production company that made them don't own the copyright, so they're £$%$ed. That's potentially a lot of movies and TV shows that are eventually just going to vanish into black holes, never to be seen again.

[blackmissionary]

The archive status of video games is in a very similar position to where the film industry was a while back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film

Unless someone goes out of their way to preserve these materials, legally or otherwise, it's all at the mercy of how the big studios care or don't care. And then something like this happens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

[Dave The Man]