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A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.
“For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation has been supporting with the Software Preservation Network (SPN) on a petition to allow libraries and archives to remotely share digital access to out-of-print video games in their collections,” VGHF explains in its statement. “Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers.”
Essentially, this exemption would open up the possibility of a digital library where historians and researchers could ‘check out’ digital games that run through emulators. The VGHF argues that around 87% of all video games released in the US before 2010 are now out of print, and the only legal way to access those games now is through the occasionally exorbitant prices and often failing hardware that defines the retro gaming market.
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“No! They’ll enjoy preserving our history to muuuch!!”
They know the dark secret of book preservation. The people preserving the books… gulp READ THEM!
Libraries facilitate widespread piracy of books, by allowing people to read them without a distribution licence, or even take them home!
This is a clear violation of the DMCA, and thus must be stopped immediately!
I get the sarcasm even if others don’t.
Someone else on Lemmy said you couldn’t invent libraries today. It’s true.
There’s a group called Improv Everywhere that used to do really creative flash mobs like the No Pants Subway ride where they would all claim to have forgotten to put on pants that day, or going into a cafe and lugging 90s desktops in and dialing in, or during the Great Recession they had a suicide jumper on a 2ft high ledge which they dramatically had to talk down.
They once tried to do a “writers against libraries” stunt but it ended up not being funny enough because people kinda went “oh yeah libraries are kinda weird in that they just give out books for free”
Criminal contempt of business model, indeed.
Well, time to finally make my own collection to play
That’s what I’ve been doing. Been collecting various PS1-4 games on top of GameCube, Wii, and Switch games over the past year to rip and save digital copies for myself. Then I play them on emulators.
I have roughly a few hundred so far and plan to expand it further.
I have a NAS with two 8 TB drives in RAID to back them up and it’s already over 50% full. I want to start collecting OG Xbox and 360 games in the near future, but I need to get jailbroken consoles for them.two 8 TB drives in RAID to back them up
Obligatory “RAID is not a backup”
Sure, but it’s a start. It’s certainly better than trying to keep them on my laptop. And I do hope to add more forms of data backup/storage as time goes on. It’s taken several hours ripping all those games and I’d hate to lose them all.
I also have an external 4 TB SSD that I keep most of the games on (excluding the PS4 games because they simply take up too much space).Make a torrent, best backup.
I used to have a RAID6 (could lose two drives) without a backup, then some power surge killed 5 of the 12 disks. Trust me, you do want a backup.
Probably the easiest way to do an off-site backup for low-double digit terabytes is an external drive in a bank safety deposit box. Remember your home could burn down fall over and sink into a swamp and no amount of parity drives within the home would keep that data safe.
Especially RAID 0.
That would be funny if someone thought RAID 0 was a backup solution, ahaha
Original Xbox modding is fun as hell. You need to track down a 300GB PATA/IDE hard drive, then load the sucker up with ROMS. The modded OS comes with a built in FTP server so its pretty effortless to load up it with ROMs. Last I tried (like 10 years ago) Xbox reliably played roms from SNES and older, and could less than reliably but still successfully play N64 and PS1 games. I was even able to change CDs on FF7.
Man I want to mod an Xbox now. If I remember right, you need a copy of mech assault…
Actually explains a lot of decisions by game publishers the last 5-10 years if their official position is that games are meant to collect dust on a shelf rather than being played.
You can’t have criticisms about the game if you put it on a shelf instead of playing it.
Sure you can, criticisms like “takes up too much shelf space” or “is too heavy for my shelf”, “doesn’t go with the color of my wallpaper behind the shelf”.
Good thing the games are digital now! Your virtual shelf (steam library) looks perfect with our 600gb slop shooter game!
Knowing the game industry right now they will probably sell you different colored shelves and wallpaper and dividers,… for a premium.
Mustn’t forget the limited edition pre-order special shelf wallpaper.
They really want to force gamers to buy their new games which are pretty much like the old games but now with extra helpings of ads, gambling mechanics and micro transactions on top
They really want to force gamers to buy the old games, just as they were, because those are next to free to adapt to a different platform and people will pay for them.
Not to be my usual old codger, but a lot of these game in questions were microtransaction-based to being with, in the very Farmville-y format of charging you a quarter for each set of three lives and then being ungodly broken and difficult to make sure those three lives didn’t last any longer than a minute each and entice you to pay for three more.
This absolutely sucks, is based on unjustifiable logic and takes the side of business over a demonstrable common good, but let’s not pretend the business logic behind it was invented in 2005. Game publishers have been game publishers longer than many of the nostalgic posters have been alive.
I don’t think we’re talking about arcade games at this point though. We’re talking to a large extent about 3rd–6th generation home gaming consoles. For Nintendo, that’s the NES to GameCube. Sony entered with the PlayStation in the 5th gen, and Xbox came out in 6th.
I think a lot of people would see this (and to a slightly lesser extent the 7th gen) as the high point where games came out in a completed state and you paid once and the just enjoyed the game.
Well, no, we’re talking about everything. Everything before 2010, explicitly.
I would guess most people just fill in whatever moment of their childhood there was when they would buy a thing and enjoy a thing and not worry about it too much.
Me being me (see the old codger self-identification up there), I substitute in the late 80s and 90s, when I would plead and beg for coins to squeeze in another 60 second gaming session and then go on to save for months in order to get a lesser version of that same experience at home for anywhere between 60 and 90 bucks (140-220 adjusted for inflation).
In the grand scheme of my memories, the five years after arcades were relevant and before Microsoft started charging a monthly fee to play online and Facebook started a games division are too short of a blip to consider a golden age. My nostalgia is on ranting angrily about having to purchase Street Fighter 2 for the fourth time and having Capcom re-sell the PSOne version of Resident Evil a third time for the privilege of having added analogue stick controls.
But an arcade game is a physical object. The preservation needs of arcade games are very different to games distributed on cartridge or disk, which is why I suggested that a digital library would be focusing on home game consoles, especially those released at a time when home gaming was the main way gaming got experienced (i.e., after arcades were the most popular way).
[24 years is] too short of a blip to consider a golden age
Assuming that “too short” and reference to a “golden age” was meant in refutation to my claim of the 3rd–6th console generations, which lasted from 1983 until 2007. If that’s the claim, I find it absolutely absurd. When we discuss the golden age of TV we’re talking barely one decade, from the mid-to-late oughts to the late 10s.
If you meant something else by that bit, I’m sorry, please disregard the above paragraph. But I don’t know quite what you do mean.
No, I’m arguing that if you’re trying to identify an era where the industry at large was not overmonetizing that’s your timeframe: From the death of arcades to the birth of modern casual gaming/F2P/Subscription services. By the numbers that’d be 2001-2005.
Before then you have arcades acting as the first window of monetization, where a whole bunch of console games started and where a lot of the investment went. After that you’re balls deep in modern gaming, with games as a service that are still live today, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story.
That’s a handful of years, at best. Any other interpretation has to ignore huge chunks of the industry that were behaving in the same way that makes people complain today. Either you dismiss arcade gaming despite it being the tentpole of the entire industry or you’re dismissing the fact that subscription and MTX games were already dominating big chunks of the space.
So no, it’s not 24 years. It never was 24 years.
And for the record, we knew at the time. We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997. I’ve been stuck in nerdrage Groundhog Day for thirty years.
As a fellow ancient of the game world, I would say 20ish years is not far off give or take. The Atari 2600 was around in the 70s and the original NES came out in 1985(?). The NES was really the beginning of the end for the arcade scene. True that a lot of the arcade ports where terrible, but the power just wasn’t there to do it in a small box yet. $1 rentals from the local video shop would let you play a game all night or longer depending on who it was from.
While the online game services from Xbox and co could be seen as returning to a pay-to-play situation, they where never a must have. You could still play with friends locally without a subscription and the mass push for DLC buys wasn’t there yet.
I would really put the return to money snatching along side the rise of mobile games. Buying addons and in game coins to get an advantage really picked up with the ease of always on connections and purchases with a simple swipe of the finger. Once that ‘just one more boost will do it’ addictive mechanic was made the norm it was all over for the concept of a game that you just bought as a complete thing. Now it’s a novel thing to see a game offered that you just buy and play as it is.
See, this is the part where I’m not going to dismiss your experience, because a lot of this was super regional, but I’m going to say my experience was not that at all.
I definitely spent most of the money I put in arcades AFTER I had a 16 bit console. The “arcade>marketing>console port” hype cycle went on for a decade after the NES first became a thing.
And Live Gold is just a sign of something that was going on everywhere. The first free to play hits were happening, WoW was taking over the world and making GaaS mainstream… and yeah, online gaming was becoming a thing on consoles and getting monetized in brand new ways.
But also, I’d say expansions were a thing way before DLC became a dirty word. Because Groundhog Day I distinctly remember having conversations with angry nerds in the mid 2000s explaining that there wasn’t much of a difference between DLC and a lot of the expansion packs and shovelware content expansions being pushed around all through the late 90s.
And of course there are tons of games you can buy as a complete thing. As I said above, I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, Metaphor and a bunch of other stuff that is very classic in its structure. Another constant of gaming nerdrage is that people don’t care if what they like continues to exist, they are mostly clamoring for the things they dislike not existing, which I’ve never been on board with.
But I don’t think you need to go from the time when arcades were entirely irrelevant, but merely where they were no longer the main driving force. That’s at most the late '90s with gen 5 consoles and many big popular or influential game franchises like Quake, Pokemon, Age of Empires, Fallout, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto (that’s '96 and '97 alone).
And you need to go up until at least the time when few of the largest games were available without cancerous monetisation strategies, not merely when a few games had started doing it. So you definitely need to go up to at least the launch of the 7th generation consoles in 2007.
To bring it back to the original point of the conversation, that’s not to say that it isn’t worth preserving games that did have those strategies of course. It just doesn’t detract from the sense of a period when the majority of gamers’ experience was much better.
We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997
And EA greedy in 2007. Doesn’t mean that what they were doing then was as bad as what is being done today.
Well, we’ve gone from 24 and 5 to a 10 year compromise, so we can agree to disagree on that basis.
That said, I do disagree. You are underestimating how relevant arcades were in 2001. Soul Calibur may have been an early example of the home game being seen as better than the arcade game in 1999, but it was an arcade game first, I had played the crap out of it by the time it hit the Dreamcast.
And I was certainly aware of Maple Story before it was officially released here. And of course I mentioned WoW as the launch of the GaaS movement, but that’s not strictly accurate, I personally know people who lost a fortune to their extremely expensive Ultima Online addiction in 1997/98.
I am still not convinced that the experience of those gamers was any better or worse, me having been there in person. The kids in my life seem perfectly content with their Animal Crossings, Minecrafts and even Robloxes. The millions of people in Fortnite don’t seem mad about it. I sure was angrier about that Resident Evil business at the time than people are about the Resident Evil remakes now. Hell, I got pulled from playing a fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2 by an even better JRPG in Metaphor ReFantazio, and neither of those games features any MTX or service stuff. And of course that’s not mentioning the horde of games in the 20-40 range that are way better and more affordable than anything I had access to in the 90s.
People are nostalgic of the nostalgia times, reasonable or not, and time has a way of filtering out the nastiness, especially if you were too young to notice it. I was wired enough to hear the lamentations of the European game development community being washed away by Nintendo and Sega’s hostile takeover of the industry and their aggressive imposition of unaffordable licensing fees. I was aware of the bullshit design principles being deployed to milk kids of their money in arcades. I had strong opinions about expansion packs and cartridge prices. It’s always been a business, it’s always been run by businessmen.
Best you can do is play the stuff that’s good and ignore the rest.
Second best you can do is be publicly mad at the business driving unreasonable regulations that are meant to do the public a disservice.
Third best you can do is start archiving pirated romsets to privately preserve gaming history, blemishes and all, so we get to keep having this argument when the next generation of gamers are out there claiming that Fortnite used to be cool when it was free and had a bunch of games in there instead of requiring you to sign off your DNA to be cloned for offplanet labor or whatever this is heading towards.
They really want to force gamers to buy the old games, just as they were, because those are next to free to adapt to a different platform and people will pay for them.
Nah, if they had wanted that, they would continue to release them in that format. As it stands, they don’t, so you can’t buy those old games from the publisher either.
They absolutely do. The market is full of remasters, remakes and re-releases. Having the originals readily available presumably diminishes the value of those, by the count of publishers.
That is not the same as saying that old games are available. Most of them are not, the market keeps reissuing the same handful of hits and landmark games (although we’re in an era of deep cuts now, we even have a Pocky & Rocky remaster, somehow). But they can’t set up regulations where you are allowed to lend out Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin but not Resident Evil 2, so here we are.
The stories have also gone downhill to accomodate new bastard genres with fomo shit
Love how the people don’t get represented or supported because of corporations and their insatiable greed.
The weird thing is, corporations can’t even make any money from these older games. I guess they think that means people who can’t play older games will just buy their newer garbage, and yet that’s not how it works at all lol people just end up buying indie games instead these days.
It’s about preserving the consumption culture for the mainstream. If playing older games for free was easier and legal, more people that now only play the newest AAA garbage would start doing it, and corpos don’t want to risk that culture change, because if it gets big enough it would definitely impact their sales.
Unfortunately not many people know or care about indie games and free games like Beyond All Reason, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, etc. as is.
They could and sometimes make a relatively small amount of money, but it’s more about trying to legally protect their trademarks/intellectual property as I understand it. These days I’d much rather support an indie dev over a shitty “AAA” company for sure, tired of them price gouging people for games that aren’t even that good.
Right, “if they can access the old games still, we can’t pay a understaffed 3rd party a pittance to slap a coat of paint on it and resell it at full price”
The AAA warning label is pretty much like the Enterprise warning label for other types of software.
They’re really in a bind though. Indie games are great because there are thousands of indie developers out there making games and we get to play any ones we want. All the indie games that fail don’t matter because we don’t need to pick the winner ahead of time.
AAA studios can’t operate this way because they can’t predict what will be a great game that everyone wants to play. The only leverage they have is that they can afford to hire a large team of artists to create all the graphics.
It’s really the same situation that Hollywood film studios are stuck in and the result is basically the same. Hollywood makes their MCU graphics extravaganzas and AAA studios makes their Call of Dutys.
Depending on marketing & their dedication to bringing it to market…again… they can & they do. Digitally. Nintendo has sold old video games on the Wii, Wii U platform. Then, they packaged & released the NES & SNES Classic consoles, very smart move actually & it was a cute product that appealed to many consumers.
Since then, Nintendo’s greed has grown. They no longer sell because they don’t want you to own copies of old videogames…they want to rent them to you by the month or year. Via Nintendo Online subscriptions, you can browse the whole catalog & play all kinds of old games. It requires a Switch, an internet connection, and don’t forget that sweet, sweet Nintendo Online subscription. Once you’ve gotten your fix & you cancel your subscription, you own nothing & they’ve got your money. This is their goal, everything is going according to plan. Subscription models for endless reven on old games.
You will give them your money, you will own nothing, and you will be happy.
and hilariously, Nintendo uses emulation themselves.
https://gamerant.com/nintendo-emulating-own-games-museum-windows-pc/
Hypocritical fucks
Damn, that’s crazy. Here I am being happy that I have their older consoles that I’m still playing their best older games, even with modding them and using flashcarts too etc. I guess retro gamers are a bit of a dying breed, but there’s still some people out there like me.
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Capitalism
Well that’s fucking stupid.
… but not surprising.
Corruption from potato supreme all the way down and back up to Orange Hitler
🐶 NO PLAY
🐶 ONLY BUY
They can dick about as much as they want, piracy will make sure to preserve the things they want gone. The reason they don’t want older games to be preserved is that new generations, whilst playing them, may come to realize that you don’t need gacha mechanics, stupid fomo, micro transactions, 6 different currencies, 3 different shop menus, 2 battlepasses and so forth to have a good game.
Imagine Beethoven refusing to release his catalog of works because people might stop listening to newer music. Gg capitalism.
“Capitalism creates innovation” - one of the best jokes out there
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we should probably burn it
Agreed
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I specifically need to not have those things. Those are the things that I’m going to games in order to avoid.
I wonder if the EU can somehow prevent DMCA being applied to European internet users.
Wouldn’t hold my breath, they’re just as rabid about copyright as the US is.
You haven’t sold this game in 30 years - why do you fucking care you drooling troglodite?
I don’t think I’ll ever buy a game from a AAA publisher again,they can’t be trusted and the quality of their goods has fallen sharply the last few years.
Smaller dev teams have better/more interesting IP AND seem to care what I think as their end user.
The only AAA game I WAS interested in was GTA6, but after that they just did to GTA5 I’m not interested anymore. I use Linux and they just added anti-cheat that is compatible with Linux but never enabled compatibility. They don’t want me to buy their game.
If im reading it correctly only the sharing is prohibited not the preservation.
I can live with that and fight again another day. As long as they still exist in an archive they will see the legal light of day someday(im being optimistic)
The high seas will take care of retro gamers who want to play them im sure, as Gaben says piracy is a service issue.
Given the industry’s “you aren’t buying, you are renting” mentality… very, very optimistic.
Well isn’t it just convenient that I don’t give a damn what the US copyright office thinks?
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Publishers are absolutely terrified “preserved books would be used for recreational purposes,” major book burnings ordered by federal court to be carried out in every state…
The book industry will be doing this with digital copies if they haven’t already.
Guess I’ll have to start hoarding games now
