My own definition is if you insist on keeping it, despite the fact you’ll never “consume” it again. For games, books, movies, etc. Just like old newspapers stacked up in the garage or crawlspace.
I’m fine with keeping something I will use again. A select few books and movies. Games, very few. Yes, I would be bothered if I permanently lost access to those few favorites. But, for most games (and other media) - I won’t miss them because I will never even consider replaying them. I’ll probably not even think of them again 6 months after finishing them.
A kinder term might be these people have an “archivist attiude”. To me, it’s still a form of hoarding. Not everyone shares that view. That’s fine.
Thanks for clarifying. For myself, the word “hoarding” would only come into play when a person’s “archiving” becomes harmful either to themselves or the people around them.
If they’ve got the room for it, and it’s nicely displayed, I guess I don’t see a problem, but as you say, not everyone shares that opinion.
But I should be able to have the right to possibly consume my media again (or not) in the future. I didn’t pay for “one use”.
And if in the future I realize I’m not going to do that with a certain game (or book, or movie) I’d like to be able to give or sell it to someone who will.
Why are games different than books, film, music, and visual art? I sort of see how an MMO is something like a theme park that you wouldn’t be able to visit after it closes. But it’s also not because it’s code in a computer. The server code could be open-sourced and it could be maintained by others for as long as people want.
It could be. Who’s gonna pay for that? The problem being that open sourcing something provides no value to the company (no additional sales) so they have no motivation for it. One of my jobs is sometimes taking graduate student / post-doc code and bringing it up to a quality level where it can be open sourced and built by a general audience. Even for simple projects that don’t require lots of back end resources this can be a LOT of work. If you need to have a bunch of databases or other data stores to track information this gets worse, and you need admins to keep that stuff going.
The nice thing about books, films, music and visual art is that they don’t have dependencies that change over time with functions that become deprecated or are flat out removed, or 3rd party packages that simply stop existing and break your project. They are simply something you can encode as 1’s and 0’s and are generally interpretable.
MMO’s don’t die they just spin off as private servers and do fine running on donations :). Not all of them but way more than I realized until I looked.
I’m prolly an outlier but I collect books, movies and games. I have some digital books on kindle but mostly physical copies. Old books, first editions, new books ,etc. I only own physical movies and games are pretty much mostly digital at this time except for the occasional console game. I revisit old stuff all the time. I just reread a book I first got when I was 14 (Pier’s Anthony). It was cheesy fun and took my back to when I was kid. I do this with movies and games as well. I’m currently playing Starflight! and Shining Force on Sega. I would love to do this with my digital games 20 years from now. I got a bad feeling I wont be able to though and that does make me a bit sad and has started to curb my buying habits. I’m buying more older physical games now on retro systems than new digital stuff and loving it. Man I miss a good manual, you should see some of these Genesis ones(Star Control, Might and Magic, etc.) they are fantastic and fun to go through.
There may be cases where this does happen. I think some games like City of Heroes Rebirth where a bunch of people got together and put the work in. But those are the exception, not the rule. I would say the people who have volunteered to do that are being very kind and generous with their time. I would not say I have a right for someone to pick up the slack and do that work for free.
I say “right” here because of this quote, which bothers me.
Volunteers plus donations keeps many afloat with decent populations. Here’s short list of ones I know of:
All these are alive and well (relatively)
COH
Warhamemr Online
Ragnorak Online
Lineage 2
Star Wars Galaxies
Ultima online
Asheron’s call
Aion
Terra
Archeage (higher population than live did!)
I’m more surprised when a cancelled/closed one does not have a private server.
The funny thing about this topic is these companies are tacitly admitting that they create junk that isn’t worth preserving. Regardless of the merits of this initiative, this tells me as a consumer that I should buy products built by creators that intended for them to last a lifetime.
That’s a great point. You got options with other consumer goods though. Yes, I can buy a throw away Ikea desk that wont survive a move to another room or I could by that nice handmade walnut one and give it my grandkids.
Right, we’ve already been through this process of acceptance for other goods and services. Sometimes we keep buying the junk anyway! It’s not easy and becoming militant about it might be a cure worse than the disease. At least it helps with awareness before you buy the latest Ubisoft GaaS.
For game preservation, is the requirement that it runs on whatever hardware was available at the time? Is the onus on the person who wants to play a retro game to own a 486 with a turbo button and a CRT monitor?
Not necessarily. I play original Genesis games on a FRPGA system with HDMI outs and built in upscalers. I could play it on a crt and orginal hardware as well but don’t have to.
Ditto, old Gold Box games. Run just fine through Dosbox on modern systems.
I think the gist of this thread is more to do with online only games or games with online components and single player that get killed because the MP servers get shut down.
There’s nothing like the 16-bit era when it comes to physical console games. Its permanence and quality puts it at the top of the food chain for me with gaming.
I think I object to the entitledness of the complaint. You bought a virtual item in an online game–literally the most ephemeral of things–or you paid a subscription for X years. I can agree that, gosh, it would be keen if those games never had to go away. But to complain when they do, and to talk about it as a matter of consumer rights? I think you should recognize what you paid for when you bought it. Your money doesn’t buy you a promise that wasn’t offered.
The danger with the way you perceive it is that any game built like that is essentially you taking a gamble on whether you’ll get to play it and keep your stuff for any length of time.
If people catch on to that, you’re probably going to have a hard time selling more of them…
