The Looming Tragedy of Abandonware

[@UpperEchelon]

The first 1,000 people to use this link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/upperechelongamers10221

[@damn5987]

T3A online is the place to go for working versions

[@absynthminded]

My dude, the fate of all games is dust and ruin. The industry can only move forward. By hardware, by software, by hook or by crook.

[@Zercias]

@Upper Echelon Gamers and this is why i make offline backups on a second SSD on a second hard-drive, i started doing this when i had unreliable internet and never stopped the practise. and in case of ''always-online-media'' i just backup a...altered copy for private offline consumption. Nothing will stop me from enjoying my favorite entertainment i bought. Obviously this just straight up sucks if you love MMO's or other multiplayer games, nothing you can do there. lucky for me, im not really into playing with other people.

[@JuxZeil]

Do you use the Compatibility mode properly when installing the software and on the correct .exe's after? It is a bit of a minefield, but the main problem is since Vista/Windows 7, the way the windows installer and hardware drivers interact with the system has changed drastically. The security/abstraction layer plays havoc with older games and some older gamers have even resorted to building always offline retro XP systems(highest end for the gen) just to get their older games working without issues. It's a shame, but the abandonment of games is only going to get worse. Not only do they not get so many new sales, but they see companies legally getting away with planed obsolescence all the time now-a-days. If they can't get away with gambling in their games...well, they gonna have to use a different business model to keep the growth going for the shareholders in China.(by that I mean the CCP).

[@Valehass]

Windows 11 and your graphics card are the two most likely culprits for not getting BfME working. Older graphics drivers may solve the problem but if your on W11 your screwed. W10 yes W11 no.

[@Dr_Ainz]

I work as a software engineer professionally, and I can tell ya right now- it would cost absolutely nothing for these games, even if they required perpetual server connection, to be made publicly and permanently accessible if the developers simply released the source code. There are people out there in droves intelligent & capable enough to take that source and run with it, and devise solutions to bring these games back without AAA funding. The only thing we're running up against is the grotesque, and frankly evil, fiscal incentive of planned obsolescence.

[@joesheepy]

Planned obsolescence has/is doing more to hold back consumer innovation than any one individual and or company ever could. Bloody light bulb manufacturers just couldn't help themselves and now we're stuck in the thick of it.

[@sleevemcdichael5841]

Microsoft are the biggest boogeyman in the planned obsolescence space. They own Xbox so don't want you playing any old games at all so you have to buy their new ones. Then they also make Windows so will use that to prevent you playing old games for paper thin reasons. I remember when Windows 10 was released and old games wouldn't work as they removed support for "security reasons'. Thankfully people fixed the issue after a while but I'm sure later versions of Windows will block the use of old games and the mods to allow you to play them completely.

[@NateGreensides]

@@joesheepy isn't the "free market" so beautiful? 🙄

[@ErFuyl]

​@@NateGreensidesthis isn't free market, this is monopoly.

[@caramelconundrum9280]

No, it’s not an old man yells at cloud thing. This is a very real problem that every legitimate “gamer” cares about. Thanks for the vid.

[@sheeshulex]

Hope you won't mind me piggybacking off your comment - for anyone interested in video game preservation I recommend to check Accursed Farms videos about Games As A Service and how much of a scam they are, or what happened to Darkspore and Battleforge. 9:20 - how glad I am that I actually never encountered such "people" IRL...

[@Silamon2]

Yeah, UEG said himself he is late to the topic, but it needs to be covered more and more so I don't fault him for that at all. Even Total Biscuit talked about this years ago. Game preservation is getting harder and harder with all the drm and always online games and even companies like Nintendo striking pirated copies. Nintendo itself does not let you buy the games, yet they wont let you get them any other way either? It's ludicrous. Edit: Total biscuit's video from 2015: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iX21nGl7m5yDqKs

[@pastenml]

He definitely is yelling at the cloud though, technically. Clarification: This is a pun. Not criticism.

[@billyhatcher643]

this is why i despise online shit im not buying many new games due to this shit alone and it seems most of the companies that do this online drm nonsense are big triple a companies

[@decorumlopez9147]

@@pastenml I'm here to listen and chime in.

[@KlausWulfenbach]

The very nature of copyright is intended primarily for books. It's been expanded into other media such as film and audio recordings, but originally only applied to books. Film and audio are relatively easily preserved and have institutions dedicated to preserving them. Books have had institutions dedicated to preserving them since *all of recorded history* . If software preservation should not happen, then copyright law should not apply to software. People who advocate against software preservation are book burners, plain and simple.

[@Hisu0]

And that's why all copyright should have a maximum lifetime, after which the video/audio/software in question should be released into public domain together with its source code (where applicable). More specifically, when you copyright a game, and periodically as your copyright is upheld, you must be legally obligated to provide its source code and an unprotected copy to the regulator, which bears the same kind of responsibility to preserving and keeping those copies from unauthorized access as Pentagon on matters of national security, so whenever a copy due for public domain release is "lost", people responsible for preserving it lose their jobs, and some of them also lose their freedom, for a considerable time, no bail, no pardon. I must say I hate government solutions, because they always turn out to be a hot mess, but what we have right now is even worse.

[@swanrideryt]

@@Hisu0 I agree with both of you to a great degree (maybe loosing jobs is a bit much, because I feel it can only lead to normal workers becoming scrificial goats). Copyright law literally works only for books and the HAVE a way to be preserved, called LIBRARYES. Copyright in it's current state doesn't serve the material itself and often not the creators (if you've heard of the recent HBO MAX situation with the purge of all content wrecking not only viewers but also workers) and preservation is somehow always illegal, with no way around it. Law should stop being changed and just built from the ground up for a new era of new circumstances that has been going on for a century and a half.

[@Sonicstillpoint83]

It’s been ages since I looked at any of the laws here in the US, but from what I can recall, there is a given time. Like 100 years before copy written material falls into the public domain. It would seem that A new law with a time frame set for the modern era could be drafted. An even better solution would be to work internally: video game developers could refuse to work on a project unless the publisher would agree to release their source code to a historical Society for preservation. I’m sure all developers want their work to be honored and celebrated in the future rather than relegated to the memories and the passing generation.

[@Sonicstillpoint83]

There is always a chain of custody documentation process for everything in both the technological world and the legal world so someone losing their job or other penalties would not be extreme at all because they would agree to such terms when they initially took the job. If the less desirable government intervention option is chosen, it would be like when the recipient of a prescription for narcotics is required to sign a document stating that selling their prescription comes with prison time.

[@cultistaautista]

Spot-on. Books are physical objects which can be restored, re-printed, copied, etc. Before the invention of the printing press, all books had intrinsic value because good handwriting was a skill a few people possessed, and it was time-consuming and labor-intensive. Even a re-written copy could cost a lot of money, let alone the original. After the printing press though, authors had to work harder to collaborate with talented artists and book artisans to add illustrations and quality materials, creating additional value for the resulting physical product that the high-quality editions became, attracting potential buyers to their superior physical products over cheap crappy ones. It's when you try to pose yourself as the original author of the text and earn money through it that it becomes a problem that copyright needs to deal with through legal action. Next there were cartridges and discs which followed similar patterns - you had to make your product better, and accompany it with exclusive bonus stuff, often physical. It worked because collectors still pursue said cartridges and disks. But with the purely digital format, it stops making sense, digital copyright should be radically different to avoid pitfalls such as abandonware, content barring and overly aggressive destructive DRM and unjustified online reliance that makes pirated copies superior. The only solution as it appears for now is to fully terminate all copyright upon the owner becoming unable to provide a legal way of distribution and purchase of its digital media after a set amount of time, since it cannot be resold or re-obtained upon these connections being cut. Moreover, streaming services shouldn't count as a way of purchase or distribution, because they do not fit the criteriae of distribution of media, only display and demonstration. When you pay to visit an art gallery exibition, you do not pay for or get provided any copies of the paintings or other art objects, you pay to view them on the terms of the gallery that can revoke your right to do so any time without any reason. If a gallery chooses to abandon the building permanently, close all its doors and bar them with iron, what you get is a permanently inaccessible abandoned gallery where the art is just kept away for no reason. Whoever gets an angle grinder and opens its doors will be a hero.

[@sumfgg0tt678]

The same thing happened with flash games. It’s a tragedy that you can’t even access old games from the early 2000’s

[@farmingsimulator3721]

There’s a program called flashpoint that lets you play a lot of old flash games and has versions from different websites (since some games had different versions on different sites, like a lot on armor games or max games). It’s free and works pretty well

[@volvo09]

I remember hearing that there was some project that archived newgrounds and some other site(s?) but I don't remember how much. I only played a few flash games, but man, there were so many!

[@-cat-..]

@@farmingsimulator3721 I was just about to mention Flashpoint too, it's a much better way to easily replay flash games then sketchy browser extensions from flash sites

[@ThrashMetalWolf666]

Newgrounds, and BlueMaxima have been preserving Flash history for a while now with Ruffle, NG Player, and Flashpoint. Now not every Flash game is preserved as some can only be played with the Wayback Machine, or if you have the SWF file, but plenty of Flash history has been preserved, and playable on modern PCs, and browsers.

[@jstriker90]

Ahh Newgrounds. My home away from home.

[@logsupermulti3921]

Glad to see UEG shedding light on this topic. Ross from Accursed Farms has been a vocal opponent to the way large companies treat game preservation for years and has several good videos on the topic, including his semi-viral '"Games as a service" is fraud' video that goes way more in depth on the topic.

[@wallyhackenslacker]

Mutahar has also been very vocal about it, and about how emulation is a crucial part of game preservation, because it's not just the games, the disc and the cartridges, but also the hardware that needs to be preserved in some way as well. Us classic Macintosh gamers (pre OS X) know this painfully well.

[@Polyvalent]

I'm glad you brought up Ross. Absolute legend.

[@robsilvester6213]

"Games as a service" FTFY

[@mikeexits]

@@Polyvalent I had only known him from Freeman's Mind for many years. One day out of nostalgia I looked it up again to relive the series and then was pleasantly surprised to find that he's vocal in the gaming space.

[@silverhawkscape2677]

Sadly with the Success of Genshin Impact, a Perfect Games as a Service Gacha game. The concept isn't going away. Ut might just increase.

[@Juanguar]

C&C generals was my childhood and I still play it today I’m glad it’s still sold today and wasn’t actually abandoned entirely

[@bruhSaintJohn]

Funny you should mention it The game you're seeing here is basically a reskin of generals.

[@Juanguar]

@@bruhSaintJohn wait what ? That’s new to me lmao

[@Oryxification]

Also the fans have made an update called shockwave that adds loads of new units new generals new powers. People still care.

[@Juanguar]

@@Oryxification yup Personally I like the game vanilla with only gentool to make it work with modern systems

[@zioming]

I have it installed on my PC right now :D Though I had to download a pirated copy and mess with some settings to make it work, since the original I have was a lost cause. I also saw something about an open source remake online, so maybe we'll get one one day, like with openTTD and rollercoaster tycoon.

[@gords1001]

I've had my son on Origin for a few years, scrolling through the games available and I found syndicate, a game I played on my Amiga 500plus when I was in high school, he was amazed when it downloaded in seconds (the whole game was megabytes of data) and he's been playing it himself, old games are worth saving.

[@samchaleau]

Totally agree. Some of the best games ever are 15-25 years ago or older.

[@goatofdeath]

YES! One of my fondest high school gaming memories is playing the original Syndicate at a friends house. I played for 36 hours straight before crashing. I remember looking outside at one point, seeing it was sort of light, sort of dark, then looking at the clock and seeing it was around 7. I then asked my friend sincerely if it was morning or evening. He said it was evening. I was shocked. I then went back to playing for several more hours. :)

[@holdensachs8955]

Satellite Reign from 2015 is the spiritual successor of Syndicate. It's pretty decent.

[@goatofdeath]

@@holdensachs8955 Good to know. I just checked my massive backlog of games bought on sale but never played. Turns out I bought Satellite Reign on GOG at some point. Guess I'll have to actually try playing it sometime now.

[@NelsonStJames]

I've still got all those Ultima games for Commodore.

[@coahmain]

it hit me when i could no longer access the wifi trades in the og pokemon diamond, my first pokemon game ever. i was heartbroken because i knew soon after, my other favorite games would follow. :(

[@mattgibson9337]

Funny enough someone managed to get wifi working for the ds, by using a specific dns server you are able to connect with others on wifi, and by using another server you can access all the wifi events for the ds Pokemon games

[@Revan_7even]

@@mattgibson9337You can even trade with the dns.

[@mattgibson9337]

@@Revan_7even yeah it's crazy that someone was able to set this up, now if only someone could bring back the Dreamworld.

[@Solaceon]

@@mattgibson9337 I'm still waiting on the Wi-Fi Plaza :( Unless they did add it and I just didn't know about it

[@jbird4478]

Many CD-ROM games, including yours, can be found at the Internet Archive as ISO images. You just mount the image as a virtual disc and it's completely the same as the actual disc. You don't need obscure sites that use all sorts of weird repacking technology that's often buggy.

[@atemoc]

But when no torrents are available, the download speeds are absolutely horrendous

[@Mernom]

Some games just won't launch on modern systems due to obscure tech issues. I tried to get my legally owned copy of C&C3 Kane's Wrath to work many times, with no luck.

[@fpvx3922]

Interesting

[@Blackwatch8800]

@@Mernom I had to buy all C&C games on Steam AGAIN to play them, I know it’s not a financial disaster or anything, but it still something I should not be forced to do.

[@johnsmith2076]

@@Mernom I use an emulator to play my Sega favourites. Would a virtual machine running a 32-bit Windows XP (or older) be worth trying?

[@Yosterix]

There is another problem not touched upon, back in the day, if a game was large enough, it came with multiple disks. But now, if a game doesnt fit on one disk, you need an internet connection to complete the install, pretty much all xbox games are like this, at least as far as I can tell. So there is potentially the point where even owning the disk wont allow you to install the game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems even owning a physical copy of a game isn't the same guarantee it once was.

[@samusx2175]

Yep. Updates, patches, etc. for disc games. Especially these days.

[@TheDiner50]

Are you jokin. Fallout 76 disk was just a code to activate the game on there launcher or whatever. And even if the game fits on a disk your still beholden to DRM. And allot of games are launched broken so you need updates if there even exist ones to fix the broken games companies launch daily. Without being allowed to run that game your disk is just garbage. At best broken and not finished/fixed. So there is 0 reasons to get the physical copy after xbox360 gen of consoles. Really the closest we got to digital age physical copies are from GoG. As a example Mafia 3 comes in a install executable 'backup' as well as getting a game download launcher on top of that very similar to Steam. But this 'backup' is possible to download from the web and run offline to install the game without DRM. But the game contains DRM but GoG legally have removed it from being a problem in the case of Mafia 3 as the example here. When you boot up Mafia 3 it is trying to phone home and stuff to check if you got DLC/micro-transactions. But GoG version very fast just skip this step and gives you everything if you paid for the complete game. And you can get to that point without ever connecting to the internet as long as you got that 'backup' and a working computer for that game. And as long as you download the latest update 'backup' you got the working and complete game that YOU own. This is what the standard should be. Only alternative as always being the seven seas. And GoG is not without flaws do not get me wrong as some GoG chill. As is seven seas not clearly the best option.... But talking about physical copies as a sense of owning anything. Really GoG and pre Xbox One is the only clear way. Even say Steam with allot of indi games are beholden to DRM and can tomorrow be gone! OR rather be blocked from using in the future. WIth GoG or seven seas you can hold a usb drive in your hand and still claim that you own something. :c And there are real good games that we are cheated out of owning. But seven seas covers most of them GoG do not. Even now that is also wrong in a way. But be aware! GoG you can say are the same company that launched Cyberbug2077. They are as evidence from that game not the angles of this world. But still Good Old Games is far better then some console disk.

[@Underqualified_Gunman]

@@TheDiner50 thankfully though if steam ever goes defunct you'd be able to use a steam emulator as valves license gives you room to do so with steam.

[@BriBCG]

Even when the games are complete on physical media they're often not worth playing in that unpatched state these days. Not to mention all the DLC will become lost as well, for whatever that's worth.

[@I.____.....__...__]

Some games don't even come with a disc at all, they are just an empty box with a piece of paper with a key to download it. 😒

[@stoffhimel]

I realized this ages ago. we are headed to a digital darkage. the past wont exist because its cord was pulled. as for your game issue, try installing an older version of windows in a virtual machine.

[@NGMK]

Unfortunately, that doesn't always work - retro game reviewers often show how hard it is to get older games running, even with virtual machine.

[@Blood-PawWerewolf]

I still can play my old games on Windows 11 using PCGamingWiki and tools like DXWND and dgVooodo2. Ot just requires a lot of tweaking, trial and error and time. It’s definitely not a plug-and-play method, but it’s definitely rewarding in the end.

[@bretton_woods]

I am lucky to still have a PC running Windows XP. Plays all the best games (the games that came out more than 15 years ago. No interest in the newer stuff. Everything since has been a downgrade IMO)

[@swanrideryt]

@@Blood-PawWerewolf I've never even heard of these! I have known about virtual machines, but they weren't much of an option because of my unoptimized potato, and was strugling to make do with a windows 7...also potato. Can you please give some pointers to where I can look for information on those?

[@everx7]

Sure but if u listen carefully if its always online games, u wont be lucky even with VM. I can run almost everything on my old laptop on windows 10, latest, and running all the old games, some has a bit of trouble like MM 9, but if u convince it with some fixes, it will run great. Look shit, but run great, cause the max res only res is 800x600 :). Still love it, others hate it, i dont care. Soulbringer is another example, u play with it around and then u can launch it. What a game :). Clunky but fulfilling, has tat atmosphere that no new game can bring, but sure new games look soo much nicer :). Still if love something, u love something and will try whatever its in ur power to get it working.

[@kempolar9768]

No one likes it when single player games require you to be online to play them, not a single person.

[@Ramsey276one]

999% THIS!!

[@sleevemcdichael5841]

Its why I only play games from the 90's and early 2000's. Thankfully most of my favorite games from that era have reasonably big fan bases still so you can get ISO's and play them in Windows 10. Was just playing C&C Red Alert yesterday.

[@kempolar9768]

@@sleevemcdichael5841 I mean most current games also don't have online only, its just the small amount that do we are getting mad at here. You are absolutely free to play games from the 2000's up to the current year and be relatively fearless about the topic, if you are really worried then just make sure to do a bit of extra research before buying them. And in fact by limiting yourself like that you are avoiding a whole chunk of absolute banger new titles. Doing yourself a disservice there in my opinion.

[@sleevemcdichael5841]

@@kempolar9768 I have played new games and think most are just nice graphics with empty gameplay. The Crusader Kings series is great. Worldbox is a lot of fun too as are the Total War: Warhammer games. Games went the same way as movies, you get odd gem, some good indie ones but the big budget Release are pretty looking but empty (and usually trying to push a political agenda)

[@kempolar9768]

@@sleevemcdichael5841 Have you tried any of these? Furi, Hades, Nier Automata, Doom Eternal, Horizon Zero Dawn, Crosscode, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Darksiders 1-3 + Genesis, Gravity Rush 1-2, Titanfall 2, Control, God of War 1-3 + the norse one, Solar Ash, Prototype 2, Manifold Garden, Bulletstorm, For Honor, Path of Exile and Neon White. These are just some of my personal favourites and there are tons of other greats out there for all genres.

[@davidml1023]

For me, it was Microsofts combat flight simulators. I spent so many hours on those. I was a terror in the sky. If I could, I'd play those again in a heartbeat.

[@BattleHistories]

Ooh the memories of that game. I remember playing it often with one of my uncles to the point where we broke his steering wheel trying to perform acrobatics... yes I know we should have used a joystick... but sometimes you need to learn by making the mistakes 😜

[@joesheepy]

Flashback to my old man putting star wars spacecraft into combat flight sim for me and my little brother to fly around with on a windows 95 PC. Good times!

[@AshnSilvercorp]

A few games purposefully went FOSS instead of becoming abandoned. There's a reason why people should embrace Free and Open Source software for core projects and encourage proprietary developers to release code years after a game has seen its success. Heck... some games like Mindustry succeed while being FOSS. You can just straight up compile your own copy free of charge (not with Steam features though). The game is still making money. People don't realize how far modders can take a game.

[@Spectere]

Exactly. I always like to use Doom as an example of this. Classic Doom is never going to die because its development was entrusted to the community. It's supported modding from day one, and the 1997 source code release allowed the community to port it to new platforms, enhance the engine, etc. If that option isn't available, tolerating reverse engineering efforts (OpenTTD and OpenRCT2 come to mind) is a healthy alternative.

[@TheDiner50]

There are problems with open source. But if people started to make games with FOSS tools and then after having a success at selling the game and creating a community around the game. Just.. Gave it to the community? That is the right thing to do. But for that to work it has to be done with FOSS tools. OR you got to have written the hole thing yourself. But there is a endless talk that can be made about the topic. But to say it fast and strait. It makes it hopeless to have a community to make mods. Since people are just going to go off there own branch of the game. With a final version of a game the community creates a mod manager and so mods are constrained enough to not nuke the community into 100 different branches of the same got dam game. Normally mods start to respect eachouther and work together to be played together if they are based on the same version (newest version of the game for example) But ones everyone can branch off that rarely happens. OpenTTD being maybe the best example of a excellent execution of constant updates that improve on the core game and still allow modding that last YEARS. Skyrim started to add paid mods and wrecked the mods. Minecraft update and makes modding really hard to transfare to the new version and people give up on working on the mods. It is the same with Linux. FOSS needs to be used right. And that is hard to do.

[@xNWDD]

Honestly I'd rather have everyone embrace source available but not FOSS, it's just disgusting how most (non-huge) corps generate significant revenue building on top of huge amounts of open source work without contributing anything back or contributing orders of magnitude less than they receive.

[@Spectere]

@@xNWDD The only real difference between source available and proper FOSS is licensing, and not all companies do a good job at drafting a license. The source code for the games Heretic and Hexen were originally released with a restrictive license (essentially, a bog standard Activision EULA) that prevented the community from doing anything meaningful with the released code. The code for both games was eventually relicensed under the GPL. The GPL has everything you're looking for, as it was specifically drafted to ensure that code will always remain free. If companies decide to extend GPL'd software they are obligated to provide the source code. Granted, this doesn't necessarily mean that they will, but a restricted source available model doesn't guarantee that, either, and the latter has a history of causing issues with the community and preservationists.

[@AshnSilvercorp]

@@xNWDD AGPL adresses part of that problem really.

[@akhaadi1086]

Probably the most upset I've been was losing my physical copy of BFME2 back in 2014 or so, and realizing I'd never be able to get another copy of it, and the only person I know to buy another copy had to get it from, in his words "a gas station in Siberia". It was the only RTS I actually liked playing, and the RotWK campaign was some of the most fun I'd had when I was a kid.

[@AnubisG0D]

That's why now it is time to fish it up from the torrents of the high seas! I mean... Rings of Power did say that "the sea is always right". EDIT: I mean.. absolutely no need to buy it in order to get it "digitally" now since it was abandoned by those who made it.

[@how2pick4name]

Once we had shareware, try before you buy. Now we have pre sales, buy before you try. I have no idea what's wrong with the younger generations. It's like they like to get ripped off.

[@Beregorn88]

We had pre-order too... The original pre-ordered of Duke Nukem Forever has become a sort of memorabilia

[@hardbrocklife]

Mass psychosis man. We didn't have the massive amount of social media hammering advertising into our brains. They have no discernment, and are more concerned with a purchase allowing them access to a social circle than the game being good. Like all those people who bough 2077 and to this day say its a good game.

[@Ramsey276one]

Just… NFTs Not Fucking Thinking

[@huks9380]

@@Beregorn88 Yes, but pre-orders made more sense due to disc production and delivery times, but now that games are being sold digitally there's no reason or excuse.

[@dwrabauke]

They love it. They will do anything to be first and able to 'brag' about their 'achivements'.

[@ItIsGonnaGetWayWorse]

Remember, kids. Treasure your old copies. The future is dystopian and copyrighted.

[@volvo09]

yep, these DRM and online only games will be dead in the future.

[@amentco8445]

fight this future as much as possible. Remember, emulators were able to become legal.

[@frostreaper1607]

Dystopian, copyrighted and subscription based.

[@Monkechnology]

@@frostreaper1607 and "sanitized" by our Overlords

[@piotrd.4850]

and hardware they are compatible with.

[@Sadiinso]

Your video made me realize what a problem this could be. I saw myself playing the first few "heroes of might and magic" when I was young. I would feel really sad if I knew I couldn't play these games anymore as they're nearly part of my childhood in my memories. I may not care about recent games that have been abandoned and become unplayable because their servers went offline, but I know I will care when it affects a game I used to enjoy.

[@goldmidwest]

HoMM3 is still relatively easily accessible and easily obtainable on modern machines with minimal amounts of conflict, crashes, obstacles, work arounds etc. GoG for example. HoMM2 may be out there somewhere but is more likely a very comparable case to OP's video. I actually happen to still own the physical copy disc of HoMM2. HoMM1, I mean that's a pipe dream I'm pretty sure. Remember them purple hydras?

[@mikex3908]

Personally, I believe if a company abandons a game and/or shuts down its servers, then they're giving up their rights to the IP and should have to open source the code so those who want to keep it available/going can.

[@edelzocker8169]

Giving up their rights to the IP means it goes into public domain and according to the law of my country, only a natural person can be the author and also the owner of the rights but companies can be in control of the licensing...

[@Hypnotically_Caucasian]

Imagine 2/3rds of the games you're playing now becoming like Wildstar by 2030 That's where we're headed

[@eloelo6944]

One more reason to quit this fucking gaming shit. Back in the day games were legendary. Resident evil series (before re5), tekken, prince of persia trilogy, GTA San andreas, need for speed Carbon underground most wanted, oblivion, diablo 2, burnout, wasteland 2, Baldurs gate, early tomb riders, Rayman on ps1, zelda and many many other amazing games of different genres. People are telling me I'm just nostalgic I'm like wtf bro take a look on Steam and it's another assassin's creed or call of duty that is just a reskin with most popular recent game is an anime dating sex game (ffs rly? If you are playing this shit cuz u r lonely then good luck you will just end up being more miserable). There is no innovation and passion in gaming anymore it sucks there used to be a exciting game released every fucking week you didn't know what to pick. No originality anymore there is like maybe 2 quality games released each year. But the Devs don't need to give a fuck stupid gamers will just buy another reskin. Back in the day Devs used to showcase the game mechanics now they get hard over some fucking unreal engine like who gives a fuck anymore? I spent more time on slay the spire than I did in any big budget AAA game in the last 2 years like wtf is this? But I've noticed this is true for almost everything. Everything has its golden age when it has just recently become very commercialised. Because it creates a boom in the industry and everybody needs to bring something new and different to the table so they can compete. But a little later when something has been mainstream for a while it goes downhill because people settle for subpar unfinished products. Back in the day when you saw Ubisoft/Bethesda/Activision/Rockstar you knew this game gonna be good, now you know it will be shit.

[@rallyfeind]

This already is an issue for tabletop rpg's. If a company makes a game and has an app then tanks the app is dead and the game is also. Rendering the books that depend on the app unplayable also is the reverse effect of abandonware that has real world effects already.

[@PJammaGod]

Which is why I always buy physical copies. Everyone might cheer on D&D Beyond. I've still got my 3.0 and 3.5 books (which get regular use) as well all the good 5e books. It's not called Pen & Paper for nothing.

[@Shadeius]

You must love upcoming One D&D then.

[@rallyfeind]

Remember when Skylanders style minis and MS Surface tables were being pushed as the next step of playing D&D as they were leaning to 4th? This is the end goal of toy makers and model companies selling games. A renewable income stream with subscription and FoMo preorders. They want all of the videogame and tabletop spending to go in their direction. Edot: If WotC could make a rule that only freshly opened packs could be used at tournaments and keep the majority playerbase they would. Oh wait they just put out another edition and do that anyways.

[@dubbleawesome3982]

It's always fun to see people first come to this realization, that many of us retro game enjoyers have had for about 10+ years already. 70s-2010 games will be fine, but anything where the majority of the code is on a server not your computer is just gone when support drops. and even the most diehard ONLY NEW GAMES person will eventually have this moment where they realize they can't go back and get warm feelings again from that really fun game they liked when they were a kid. But it'll be too late then.

[@LemurG]

I’ve dealt with this on a smaller scale, my favorite childhood games from Mac and mobile get abandoned because either they are removed from app stores or new software version just don’t support them. One of my favorite mobile games was one called Doors and Rooms, which was a puzzle game with an extremely pretty artstyle. After the serious got countless sequels and then was poorly monetized, support for it was totally stopped and now it has been removed from all stores. The only gameplay walkthroughs online are from over a decade ago and just show later versions that had the horrible money-hungry parts implemented. This means I can never access one of my favorite games or even see videos of it anymore

[@wallyhackenslacker]

Mobile is such a hostile thing to preservation it's not even funny. A while ago I found out Apple outright removed the iOS version of a game called Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab from the App Store since the developer, Freeverse, closed up shop in 2016 or so. The MacOS X version is available on the Macintosh Garden though, so at least that one is not lost media, but who knows how many mobile games have been now lost to time.

[@Fearmocker]

I feel the same nostalgia about my best time in gaming from Lineage 2 way back in open beta. I miss those days so much and the people I played with. I still keep in touch with several of them today.

[@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360]

At least, for LA2 leaked server binaries exists. It can't go away forever.

[@Snakedude4life]

Just a friendly reminder that Konami completely lost the source code for silent hill two and three. This is why, in part, the silent hill HD collection was a mess. 🎩 🐍 no step on Snek! 🇺🇸🇭🇰

[@DavidNwokoye]

How tf do they "lose" source code LMAO

[@ZroolmpfCelmbror]

@@DavidNwokoye Maybe the server handling their version control was never public facing and got tossed, along with however they were backing things up.

[@dustojnikhummer]

@@ZroolmpfCelmbror i heard something early Konami not using any versioning, or was that Squaresoft?

[@Killerduck0213]

@@DavidNwokoye This is extremely common amongst publishers and developers. Once support for a game has ended companies tend to just toss its source code to the wayside and if the random HDD they archived it on kicks the bucket or gets thrown out, there goes your source. Homeworld: Cataclysm didn't make it into the Homeworld remastered collection because at some point over the years its source code was lost and the devs couldn't introduce any of the new features that Homeworld 1&2 got.

[@RarebitFiends]

Never did I expect to see someone from Zack's comments here.

[@The2808erik]

Videogame copy protection crackers are actually the good guys.

[@edelzocker8169]

And all companies (exept Nintendo) ignore it...

[@kempolar9768]

I ran into this issue just yesterday, I wanted to check the old trailers for Super CloudBuilt (I was running through a bunch of games trailers to see which ones were good or bad) when I found out they took it off the PS store. I still have access thankfully but now no one else on console can ever get that game unless they resort to piracy. And the same thing for Styx: Shards of darkness, which after looking online I can't even find someone mentioning that it was taken down or the reason for that. This is why I'm trying to get all of my favourite games that I already own digital into physical copies. Edit: Turns out that while the main page is down, the demo page for shards of darkness is still up showing that they just forgot about it. You can't use it or link through to the main page sure, but you would think sony would scrub it from the store entirely.

[@FullTimeGaming360]

Styx is still available via the steam store at least, sucks that PS didn't keep it on sale as it is a very fun game

[@kempolar9768]

@@FullTimeGaming360 And it had probably my favourite trailer of any game too, straight up just like 3 sections each running for a few mins of someone just playing the game. No fancy CGI where I can't even really tell what the gameplay is like that a ton of games have. I wish more games had trailers like that.

[@XDRosenheim]

Just note that you do not really need to buy a physical copy for that. With many digital games, you can simply burn the installed files onto a disk yourself. Does not work for every game, but for the vast majority of games. I plan to get a NAS at some point and always have my games available on that. It will only cost a new harddrive maybe once per year or more.

[@SleepyMatt-zzz]

As someone who has a keen interest in art history, including contemporary art, I am always concerned about games preservation. Games should not solely be considered commercial products, they are also cultural goods that have had a great influence in society, especially in the last 2 decades. Games are an artform, and I think the idea of games preservation hasen't been taken seriously for a long time because many gamers and non-gamers never considered gaming media to be art. UEG's story hit home pretty hard, the first instances of abandonware I struggled with personally was Black & White 2 and BF:2142, both games came out around the same time as Battle for Middle Earth. I don't usually condone it, but in this case I definitely think that piracy can help mitigate this issue. For the same reason why I emulate Older Nintendo games, I am a firm believer that piracy in games exists because of lack of options for consumers. If a company doesn't want to support or distribute their products anymore, they shouldn't complain when consumers find a way to get their games.

[@wallyhackenslacker]

Exactly this! Letting games get lost to time is just like losing books, music or movies.

[@kompav5621]

Furthermore, the idiots who say "old games suck lol" are almost always from this new generation of gamers who have no idea what a good game looks like. The most lovingly crafted, superbly thought out games I've experienced are mostly old, numerous abandonware by now; Black and White and its predecessors (Populous), Stronghold, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Starlancer, Freelancer, Battlezone: Combat Commander, Ground Control, Legacy of Kain series, Jedi Knight II, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds... The diverse genres are seemingly endless.

[@CowCommando]

Ross Scott has been fighting for game preservation for years. Welcome to the club. Edit: In other words, we're not mad you're late to the party. We're just glad you're here.

[@nefelibatacomingthrough2707]

We live times where the right to actually own your purchase is on the table. From farmers and their tractors to gamers and their games people are left with a bone in their hand and corporations are taking an all growing portion. Upper Echelon keeps me informed! +1

[@BattleHistories]

Couple things here that spring to mind. 1) I don't know what you mean with that you've tried a lot of options found online but with the BFME franchise I know there is a dedicated FB group and website that has modded the games to an extent that you download their version and you can still play it. I also still have the original discs for BFME 1 and 2 but I ran into problems with BFME 1 many times on more modern systems so I reached out to this "illigal" version. It has run on my previous PC for years and every so often I'd come back for the memories and to feel like I'm emerging myself into Middle Earth. 2) The one hope we have is that there are indy companies which are buying the rights to beloved old franchises and bring them back to a working state for newer systems. Think about Age of Empires series, especially age of empires 2. In that case the original publisher might still be interested. However that would already be more difficult for always online games... I have already lost hope for publisher organised remasters because those are usually badly performed cash grabs. I am looking at you Blizzard. 3) The extra hurdle you run into with the BFME series is that EA has lost the rights to the LOtR franchise. And this is (or at least was) a very difficult franchise to get your hands on so there is an extra layer there as to why this one can't be re-released so easily. Because actually in my opinion this would indeed be one of those old franchises that could benefit from a remaster and make quite a good profit. Just my thoughts on this entire ordeal. Thanks again for a great video!

[@fmf5304]

i know all to well what it feels like to have a game you loved become abandon ware, 2012 august 8 Xbox 360 a game called hybrid was released, it wasn't really anything special but it was a fun cover to cover third person pvp shooter, always online and so obscure even when it was new i still haven't met someone else who played or has heard of it, so it didnt last long but the long nights playing that game will always be a good memory for me

[@Winterydee]

Sadly this is something which I have been saying could and would happen since the start of Steam and Digital Distribution/Streaming(in all of its forms)in general. I've said it before and will say it again here, the internet is one of the greatest and yet worst things of the modern era. Yet we have given up so much of our modern lives over to it, because it is easier and more convenient. Brick and mortar stores maybe a announce, but getting a physical copy of something is something which never should be overlooked.

[@MrQwertyman111]

Problem is, said physical copies need online activation to get them running. Yeah, once they're installed, most will work in offline mode just fine. But for a crushing majority of games, their physical editions are tied to some storefront, and you won't install unless it has access to the internet. That's why I stopped buying physical games for stuff I want and which is published on GoG among other places. My wife says I'm crazy, but I have over half of the 600 games I legally own in total backed up as offline installers. Only way to go.

[@phir9255]

It doesn't have to be physical, you can just have an external hdd with all the games you want to save.

[@brainybungler1678]

GOG revived and released a game from 1998 I love called Warlords III: Darklords Rising. There is still a webpage called warlorders and I couldn't get it to really work on anything after Windows XP.

[@vizthex]

the current trend of live service everything that companies are pushing is making preservation even harder, because all the data is stored on some faraway server, and most companies simply don't want to hand off abandonware for basically no good reason.

[@raven800plays]

I always give any new game I play the "dead switch" test. If I flip off the power to my router and the game is still playable offline, it's a winner. If it kicks me out to the main menu, I return it immediately

[@Silamon2]

Nah do it the other way around. See if you can start the game without internet at all. Some of these games now will do a check in with their servers every so often and won't let you play without it. A LOT of games on steam do this, I've had games installed for years, my internet goes out and I try to play them and it won't allow it because it tries to check in with server to authenticate and can't. Your test will weed out always online crap but not the check ins that are more sneaky about it.

[@TheDiner50]

Wow. The day you figure out that Steam force you to refresh a phone home to access games. Say 1 week or whatever timer window before you have to connect to the internet. You might find that there are many games that are going to be DED if Valve do not care anymore about your games. But true. There i no way always online is acceptable. Rather row the seven seas before allowing anything of that sort to be acceptable. Bad enough with Steam and such DRM.

[@Silamon2]

@@TheDiner50 It is why I try to buy games on gog instead of steam now. You actually own games on gog when you buy them. I don't mind Steam's DRM check in thing as much as the always online nonsense, but it gets really annoying because my internet tends to go out at times and I wanna be able to play single player games when it happens. I always end up having to play a game I've already been playing recently, or go to GoG for my offline gaming. It's the "performing first time setup" that they hide the check in behind by the way, you know it's not actually doing that when it is a game that has been played off and on for years... Edit: I actually just tried it on a few games on steam offline mode and they worked. Maybe it was my not turning internet off completely though.

[@MrQwertyman111]

@@Silamon2 Turn off any internet sources your pc might be able to connect to, and do a reboot. If a Steam game works then, you should be fine in the future. That being said, GoG is the better way whenever possible. Download an offline installer of what you bought, stash it or a resiliant storage device and you're good. Keep it well protected, and even solar flares won't damage your games. At least in theory :P

[@partyman5797]

I remembered renting bfme 2 on console so I just picked it up on Amazon for 360. Your voice is heard here brother. This is a sad state of older games.

[@Gunsong1]

The best option imo is to start using Virtual machines with the correct os on it. It's basically what was done with curse of monkey island, and hexen. The thing is this solution may not be legal depending on your approach, and while it works in some instances this isn't a sure fire solution, but it sure as hell beats the painstaking and error-prone method of editing files.

[@mabalito]

Virtual machine for Monkey Island?? Never heard of ScummVM I guess....

[@Gunsong1]

@@mabalito what do you think VM stands for in scummVM? :)

[@JoStro_]

@@Gunsong1 tbf scummVM technically isn't an emulator, moreso a reimplementation and your implication was using something akin to dosbox or virtualbox. Despite that though, you gave 2 very poor examples: Curse of monkey Island is of course playable via scummVM and Hexen uses a version of one of the most widely source ported engines ever made (idtech aka the doom engine) and could be easily played natively with chocolate hexen or GZdoom with just its WAD file. I don't doubt that there are game's that may need to be played via the use of system virtualization though.

[@dipstick555]

32 but vista days are a weird forgotten timeline. We are still in the infancy of discovering compatibility issues with this, Xbox and Xbox 360 era, etc

[@wallyhackenslacker]

And it depends on the system. For older systems like the PS2 era back emulators are things of beauty, but for most consoles in the PS3 era onwards, emulators are still pretty much a work in progress. And age isn't even a guarantee, classic Macintosh emulators of the MacOS 7 to MacOS 9 era for example are still either very unreliable, very very slow, or both.

[@sarkath77]

I've run into this a couple times. The enormous cost of classic Pokémon games, the complete loss of Pokémon Dream World, the delisting of the original Titanfall on Steam, several Halo promotional websites/ARGs, and more recently the removal of so much content from Destiny 2. These aren't random indie games that were simply forgotten about, these were high budget studios either ceasing to support or actively removing access to their work. These games deserve to be preserved and large companies don't seem interested in doing it themselves. The best solution I've heard is lowering the length of copyright protection to be equal to that of patents, and then offering an extension to the length of protection by maybe 10 additional years if the copyright holder files a copy of their work with the Library of Congress, which would mean the work would become public domain and easily accessible once the copyright ends.

[@Sonicstillpoint83]

Brilliant and thanks for sharing. I haven’t seen that solution before but it’s the best one I’ve seen.

[@JodyBruchon]

My opinion is that any type of art starts as its own isolated creation but becomes a part of the culture at large as it ages. Copyright should end after 10 years, or 20 years if the creator manually renews it near the end of the 10 years. After 20 years, we should all "own" it, because it has transcended the creator and become part of our childhoods, our earlier adult years, and more generally our formation as human beings. I should absolutely be free to use music from when I was in high school in a new video today. I should be able to hand out copies of the DOS version of Lemmings or Duke Nukem or DOOM with no possibility of legal action.

[@Sonicstillpoint83]

As I understand it, copywritten material becomes a part of the public domain after 100 years. Given the rapidity of the digital lifespan for any creation, I don’t think 25 years would be unreasonable at all. Rick Beato, for example, has been fighting this battle in the domain of music. as he is the only exposure to some of the music from the 60s and 70s that most young people will ever see. The shortsighted music labels don’t even want the revenue from his educational videos and they simply demand that he take them down. It won’t be long before no one knows who any of those artists were or of their musical contributions. Point being that it would be best interest to utilize their old material to generate interest. There wouldn’t be the deluge of piracy and lost revenue that these corporations claim. I was kind of sad a few years ago when I tried to show a friend’s son PS1 and PS2 games because he was 14 and really into gaming. He just thought they looked stupid and didn’t even play anything. There wouldn’t be near the interest that the inflated egos of the greedy corporations believe there would be

[@JodyBruchon]

@@Sonicstillpoint83 It's actually a lot longer than that, typically the life of the author plus 70 years. For a person who creates something at 30 and dies at 80, that's 120 years of no one but the author and their estate being legally allowed to distribute or authorize the distribution of their works. Also, Rick Beato makes excellent videos.

[@optionalboss3706]

accursed farms did a really good video on this exact topic, glad to see more light coming to the topic as it really needs to be looked at more.

[@PhiTonics]

A lot of this could be fixed through the abolishment of terrible copyright laws. Worst system ever. 😕

[@wallyhackenslacker]

Hear hear!

[@MsQueenOfDance]

I have a friend who not only bought and played Lawbreakers, but also bought into some of the microtransactions. That's money he'll never get back on a game he'll never get to play again.

[@wallyhackenslacker]

It's specially a matter of historical perspective. Videogames are an important cultural product as say, literature or film, and letting a game dissappear without archiving it is like letting old films in film reels rot away. And saying that that doesn't matter because "it's old, who cares" really grinds my gears.

[@invoria2784]

Hey, a recent example, Destiny 2s "Red War" campaign from its launch has since been removed. Physical disc copies are now invalid also.

[@dsagent]

In my free time when there are no other games to play I hop on Dungeon Fighter Online. I am so happy that my favorite MMO is still around after 17 YEARS! I feel bad when I see other people's favorite online games shut down and all that progress lost.

[@maniacmatt7340]

I've ran into this issue. Sid Meiers Sim Golf never got a follow up and I've only seen it on that website you called out

[@Razer5542]

I still have my physical copies of battle for middle earth 1 and 2, absolutely loved those games. Battle for helmsdeep and the battle at Minas Tirith are my 2 favorite missions in the first game, the second one has a mission where you play as sauron itself as far as i remember.

[@freekeess9245]

Yes, this should really get more attention. I have been talking about this since sim city single player game was released requiring an internet connection to play and such harsh drm that pretty much the only players on the 1st day were those that had cracked versions as the authentication server failed. I think that was 2005. I said, so what happens when they switch the servers off? Good or Bad I think they should be preserved. Books and films are.

[@spnked9516]

Ah yes, the horrific consequence of products as services. Consumers trade control for convenience, and as a result, they run the very real risk permanently losing that thing altogether. Worst part is, this problem doesn't just concern games, this extends to music and films, as well. Streaming services regularly edit or remove content for a multitude of reasons.

[@ugandanknuckles3900]

This was my experience with Lego Rock Raiders. I played that on Win98/Millennium as a child. I still remember those days and view them with the same nostolgia, watching chip and dale at lunch time etc..

[@R2DTARD]

Yes the potential knock on effect is not a good one,you'll basically won't ever own a game and I think publishers will end up playing it safe with new I.p's 😕

[@drdeesnutts48]

The cool thing about the BFME games is they are still available online through "online" versions basically versions of the game that you can download that don't have the game checks for legitimate copies. There's also T3A online that allows online play, there's also the HD "patches" and widescreen patches that make the game playable on newer systems. Where companies fail, the communities stand up.

[@danison]

RTS was my childhood

[@timothydoyle9635]

All I can say is thanks to the fans of AoE2 keeping it alive and getting new content. Most games do not have a renesance, or remain playable.

[@nobalkain624]

The same people who tell us to 'shut up and play something new' will find this same problem when they get older and games change from what they once liked.

[@OmegaZyion]

There are actually several examples of modern online-only games turning into abandonware. EA is the reigning champion of online-only abandonware as they have more dead live-service games than any other publisher. The most telling one being Titanfall where a single hacker prevented people from using the servers for years with no response from Respawn or EA who continue to sell a broken game that they refuse to fix.

[@darkworlddenizen]

Lol. Fuck EA.

[@wallyhackenslacker]

NCSoft is another one. Looking at their portfolio of games in Wikipedia, at least a quarter of them are now servers-shutdown MMO's. Boy do I miss City of Heroes.

[@ivibs1984]

2k. Evolve and Battleborn

[@cynicalia]

@@ivibs1984 battleborn flopped

[@SpiffingNZ]

@@wallyhackenslacker I have good news about City of Heroes. Look up City of Heroes Homecoming. They've done a great job preserving and adding to it and there's quite an active community.

[@Mistalleks]

Great vid! And you've mostly talked about AAA-titles becoming abandonware, but let's not forget about Indie segment - people there are much more likely to abandon support for their games, and do this much quicker - because they don't have nearly as much finances and resources as AAA-companies. Just imagine the amount of abandonware we'll get even 5 years into the future!

[@rradekanon1945]

RIP Minions of Mirth.

[@sineupp]

damn, this reminds me of my RTS phase. I believe I still have the old hard disks with many of these games still installed on them. Now I feel the urge to dig them up, and install a windows xp VM so I can play some of my favorite games like SW: Empire At War, Metal Fatigue, Act of War, Sins of a Solar Empire, Master of Orion II, etc

[@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360]

You can also help other people playing old games by sharing files in p2p networks. For example, I shared 3.8 TB of "Crazy collection" over 10 years.

[@jadencory6169]

Putting the fax on the table clearly and astutely. I hope something can actually be done to preserve the art that could very well be lost with out warning. I hope you can get your childhood game working.

[@6arag3]

This is why I wish every MMO would just release server tools and game files if their service ends.

[@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360]

The latest version is often the worst. It is better to have several versions released.

[@GMODTF24EVER]

Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria is my version of an old game that's gone to abandonware, only recently remembered it and used to play it a ton when I was younger

[@reshader8864]

It's not that hard to get BFME2 running on a modern machine. GOGs DX-Wrapper works best, but DgVoodoo or DXWnd should work aswell.

[@efficiencygaming3494]

For me, the abandonware game of my childhood was Flight Simulator 98. You wouldn't believe how much I enjoyed playing it back in the day. Now, I would need to use a virtual machine running Windows XP if I wanted to play it again. The idea of an always-online game being rendered unplayable and completely inaccessible was something that always lingered in the back of my mind. What happens to that game when all the servers get switched off? I see EA getting into a lot of trouble for something like this. We already got a glimpse of it with the way they neglected Titanfall...

[@Anna-po1sb]

I tried playing star wars KOTOR and I had similar problems - I had to change a bunch of settings in my pc so the game wouldn’t crash during cut scenes 😊

[@borasraven7584]

I feel your pain… my personal nostalgia game is black and white and the sequel… so difficult to find a source on a good working copy…

[@Alex_FRD]

You vill rent your games, und you vill be happy.

[@piefromhell]

This has already happened in some ways with old games on things that you could only get on the old microsoft games store front.

[@Mondoness]

I've been saying this kind of shit since ps3, it needs to get addressed in some way ,shape ,or form. There's been tons of abandonware on all gaming platforms and a lot of it is literally just digital licensing. "Internet Archive" and games preservation through emulation has been the greatest savior for a lot these ghosted games, but digital only we're all screwed going forward.

[@gils501]

Went through the same bs trying to play bfme2, so frustrating. Thanks for the vid.

[@MannElite]

Do an episode for what will happen when we have more games than players, surely its inevitable

[@swanrideryt]

There are games that have online in the form of making your own server to play with friends and probably others in an active community. The only real solution in my opinion. On the topic of games that aren't made that way I don't know how plausible it is to implement latter and/or through moding, but I imagine that as a possibility?

[@thedrunkenrebel]

There's also a japanese library of games whose founders want to preserve as many old games as possible and hack them out of the online component

[@J.C136]

In countries like Australia & blocs like the EU the “you buy a licence” argument has been legally dismantled & in those places you do effectively have ownership rights of those games, something that’ll probably cause a very interesting lawsuit when a publisher eventually does start discontinuing large swathes of their old products

[@fonesrphunny7242]

That raises some questions. If you bought something digitally, does the seller or publisher need to provide a way to download indefinitely? What about games that are only MP? If support ends (think about Gamespy), you'll be left with a virutally unplayable game. Is this acceptable by law? What if a company like Ubi goes bankrupt? Do they need to issue patches to remove DRM? Who exactly is liable if they don't? Are we entitled a (full) refund? What are possible loop holes? Games as service? Shell companies? Offshore bank accounts? If there is a good summary about all this, with little lawyer-speak, I'd be interested to see it.

[@johnt8276]

I have a hard full of old games. Saw this coming from a mile away so pirate bay was calling.

[@heatherharrison264]

This will be a bit long, but it is an issue that concerns me greatly, so this seems like a good place to write about it. I'm over 50, and I've been playing video games since the late 1970s. Abandonware is not a new issue. A lot of companies went bust in the aftermath of the video game crash of 1983, so the only way to acquire their games was to sail the seven seas, which in those days meant having a network of gamer friends and copying floppy disks. Having a modded disk drive that would copy copy-protected disks helped too. Nowadays, abandonware sites serve the same purpose. This can work for offline games, and they are a good place to find no-CD cracks, but sometimes the games on these sites are bugged or incomplete, and I wouldn't be surprised if malware has been distributed through these sites. Also, older games might not work well with current hardware and operating systems. There are some workarounds. Linux with Wine sometimes works better than modern Windows for older games, though results are mixed for the Windows 3.1/95 era. Virtual machines can work. DOSBox works very well for most MS-DOS games. Keeping old hardware up and running also works, as I have done with my Atari 800 and its modded disk drives. I remember when SimCity 2013 came out. It made no sense to me that a single player game would have an always-online requirement. Naturally, I refused to buy it even though I was a fan of SimCity. There was a lot of backlash at the time, but sadly, most gamers ultimately acquiesced, and it is now an accepted practice. I do not accept it and will not buy a game that has always-online DRM no matter how badly I might want it. I also worry about games requiring launchers, which is the reason that I buy the vast majority of my games from GOG and download the offline installers. I have broken down and bought a few games on Steam, but I worry about what will happen if Steam vanishes one day. I have had occasional trouble accessing games when the servers go down for maintenance, a situation that will likely lead me to search for Steam cracks for games that I have purchased. Fortunately, this only seems to affect games at startup, and they don't have to remain online, so cracking Steam shouldn't be a huge technical problem if it becomes necessary one day. The situation of always-online games reminds me of another time period from which a lot of cultural products have been lost - the silent film era. Until the advent of VCRs, most people didn't collect video media in their homes, and films were held by studios, theaters, and a small number of specialist private collectors. With very few prints existing for many films, and all of these prints languishing in storage, there are many films for which all copies have rotted away or been destroyed in some other way. The situation is similar with always-online video games. Since some of the code necessary to keep them running is held by the developers and is not released to the public, there is a high risk that it will be lost for good so that even if the rights holder wants to reissue the game in 50 years, it will be impossible. Even with some well known single player games, the code has been lost. The reason why there isn't a remastered and expanded version of Icewind Dale 2, while Icewind Dale and Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 have been remastered, is that the code was lost. Fortunately, Icewind Dale 2 in its original form is still available and is easily obtained on GOG, but losing the code could make it more difficult in the future to update this game for ever evolving hardware and operating systems. I don't play multiplayer games, so I haven't followed that scene closely, but news of games shutting down and becoming unplayable is sadly a frequent occurrence. Recently, it was announced that Babylon's Fall, which failed at launch, would be shut down after just less than a year. Even though this was evidently not a good game, it is still sad to see it and others like it disappear into the ether. Nowadays, people treasure many of the surviving films that are more than 100 years old. 100 years of now, people will certainly feel the same way about games, and all that will remain of many, or perhaps most, multiplayer online games, will be gameplay videos unless developers are keeping multiple copies of the complete code (and likely running afoul of company policies in the process). As an aside, hopefully someone out there is archiving everything that gets uploaded to KZbin so that we don't also lose the gameplay footage. It is certainly a depressing situation, but I have little hope that people have learned the lesson of the silent film era. They will let these games slip away, and future generations will curse their shortsightedness.

[@swanrideryt]

As someone younger and considerably more hopeful, looking at the history I learned. It feels to me that the silent film era had a different mindset to what we had latter and especially now. People are getting more and more aware of the situation and importance of films and games (even things such as advertisements in certain subsets of the archivers), while I feel that the people thought films were just a cool knew thing. Especially when they appeared, they were not for the general population. They really were just a cool new thing. The very first animated movie is not saved entirely because it felt like a novel showing off of human ingenuity and that was it. But it became bigger and grew, THEN people fell in love with the medium, and THEN some started to realize what was going to happen. Some really cool stories of found lost media start then and later on, only growing in frequency. ESSPECIALY with Dr. Who. That is how most people find out, because it is so famous. Now games came into the picture later enough to catch some of the people trying to preserve things. The oldest classic games, are usually playable now. Arcade games are saved, even as whole arcades waiting to be saved and made playable digitally on a computer. Early PC, Atari, Amiga etc. from my understanding was chaotic. There were a lot of games and not a lot of big names, so unfortunately, a lot of those are doomed to be lost. But there were still people saving those. There still are. So many games (and movies too, they still manage to get obscure) are found being owned by people who simply...kept them. VHS era has some of the most awesome cases of found footage because VHSs made it easy to record TV broadcasts. So a lot of things that were shown only ONCE, were saved. As PC dominated, so grew more specific companies and genres and ways for people to make games for people who want to play them and save them. Now, yes, the online space has grown in a bad way to make media less accessible, but it also helped grow communities of people wanting to save that media, by any means possible. I can't speak for online games as I am far from an expert, but they've done it with Club Penguin (a lot of times, oh poor poor Disney, how will they survive knowing a game they don't want to keep running is playable somewhere out there) so I don't see a reason why it would be impossible with all the rest. I hope at least this comment section is some reassurance that there are quite a lot of people who won't let these go without a fight. It will take a lot of effort, as it is going against companies that are just itching for a good court case to win and often borderline does go against a law that was not made to handle such a different case scenario with such a different medium. Be it saving, emulating, copying, cracking, going against a law far too old, getting on the nerves of big companies all over...this is not silent film era.

[@Sonicstillpoint83]

Thank you for writing something so detailed and full of thoughts/experience. It makes my heart feel good to see all the long trains of thought as people problem-solve and relive years gone by. Yes this is unfortunately just like the silent film era.

[@heatherharrison264]

@@swanrideryt The situation in the 1980s certainly was chaotic - I was there. It was exciting, but it was a mess. However, very few of the games on the major platforms have been lost, in large part thanks to piracy, which was rampant back in the day. I wonder about smaller platforms, such as the Timex Sinclair and the TI 99/4A, that never had much of a following. Hopefully these systems had their fans who pirated the software and preserved it for posterity. Single player games that aren't always online are not likely to be lost. Back in the 1980s, any game that was released (and any other software, for that matter) circulated among groups of middle and high school students who sailed the seven seas, and large collections were accumulated. I was a hub for this activity at my school, as I had a friend at a different school who collected Atari software, and we were the conduit between these two schools. To this day, both of us have kept our Atari systems running and have kept our large collections of software, which consist of well over 1000 games and many other types of software (we happily collected business and education software as well). As the internet became widely accessible, people released their collections of old software, and emulators were developed, so this long forgotten and abandoned software could be made available to a new generation. Online multiplayer games (and possibly single player games with always-online DRM) are at much higher risk of being lost because the server software is not generally available. We may end up with a bizarre situation in which the pioneering games of the 1970s and 1980s are very well preserved (as they are now), but an important subset of 2010s and 2020s games are lost. I just hope that employees at these companies have surreptitiously kept copies of the code so that these games can be resurrected in the future. As in the silent film era, we are depending on a very small number of people to make it possible to bring these online games back in the distant future.

[@swanrideryt]

@@heatherharrison264 I would agree that multiplayer is very hard to preserve because not all of the software is available to the player, but at least online single player is savable, because it is just one part of the program that checks for online presence of steam or whatever of the sort, which is the part that the pirates remove, because it is also there to check whether there was an unwanted change (like say illegal copying or modifying). So, for the pirated program to work, they remove it, and the game works fine. Multiplayer on the other hand is usually so intertwined with the necessity of the internet connection that it is simply unplayable otherwise and also needs additional software that is not needed for a player, so if it's not released to the public, it can't be saved in it's original form. It's a good thing modders are so good at what they do that they may come up with solutions, but chances are that not every online game is even possible to be saved, precisely because of it's programing. But since single player isn't dependent on online (I believe even mobile games with adds just have a piece of software that's tacked on for those adds), no matter how some try to make it a mess to find and remove, it is usable without it, so if a 'always online' game is on a piracy site, it already overcame the biggest hurdle.

[@knightdtd]

"Embracing short term convenience over long term viability" sums up our modern society quite well. That's how most corporations and individuals alike operate nowadays, expediency above all.

[@OfficialDJSoru]

All this is why I, after finding myself looking at announcements of closed MMOs I used to play, have a strong opinion against anyone who disagrees with preservation: the companies don't owe you shit, they're not gonna give you shit for "good behavior" and that's why we gotta take matters into our own hands. You know why abandonware is a grey area? Because the only way you're gonna see these games working again is thanks to the pirates that were busy cracking the game since launch. Without them, once the devs pulled the plug there would be no fallback. Why do you think on many abandonware sites the archive files containing everything still include the cracking team's NFO? The only "online only" games I'm willing to play so far are those that the locally hosted files locked by online progression can easily have the online only content modded to be available offline, one such game is Forza Horizon 3 which if you install on the PC through "Seven Seas access" (it's a PITA though, I must warn you), there is an AIO update available that once installed, it unlocks every single vehicle for purchase on the car shop, including cars that are no longer obtainable after the end of the game's Forzathon series. This is just one example out of many other out there that I can't remember, but if not for abandonware there would be many design concepts buried deep and overlooked that I would never try to discover.

[@kennyholmes5196]

This is why I view games to be a product and not a service, no matter how much companies might claim otherwise.

[@OfficialDJSoru]

@@kennyholmes5196 I'd suggest going beyond, cause a product can still be treated as a consumable, as in, you use and throw away, and that's what leads to nimrods saying "the game is old, who cares about old games?" And to answer their question, they better ask those who buy their second hand consoles along with their library when they put them up on ebay or FB Marketplace.

[@swanrideryt]

@@kennyholmes5196 Adobe isn't going anywhere, but this sentiment reminds me HEAVILY of them. You pay monthly to use a 'service' (serve yourself service) with which people earn money for a living. Imagine having a bad month. Like really bad. You barely have money for food bad. Oh well who cares, it is your time to pay for your overpriced subsribtion! Oh you don't have the money to pay for the tool with which you earn money? Ooohh, we're sooo sorry, but *beep* yourself. If you're paying for a person to do something specifically for you, it's a service. If you pay for the right, which can be taken from you whenever through no fault of your own, to use something for a not so long amount of time about which you have no knowledge or choice, it's not a service. It's bait and switch thievery.

[@FriezaReturns00001]

@@swanrideryt This is why I bought those Adobe copies prior to the perpetual sub only changes. Plus you can turn off the Creative Cloud that is not necessary to keep those updates they don't do too much at all.

[@ratonbox]

Depending on the public interest some games will be saved.Two good examples are the: Games for Windows Live category of games and the GameSpy games back in the early 2000s.

[@714acedeck]

the US / English version of Final Fantasy Record Keeper shuts down this month. For most modern online games, these aren't products people have spent just $60 on. Its hundreds or likely more. I know most people don't mind paying for continuing online service, weekly events or updates, but when they take it all away, and you can't ever go back, well, that's life man. But I thought games were supposed to help us escape life, not force us to deal with its most depressing parts. Game makers forgot the whole point. The reason some stories survive thousands of years (usually in books) is because you can always go back.

[@Aeis_Kalt]

I myself am VERY MUCH an advocate for playing older games, simply because they are hands-down better than 95% of the trash that are currently out. This is when people that PLAYED games actually made them, so they made them with the idea of making them fun, immersive, interesting, and most of all, entertaining.

[@mikepartlow4305]

The MyAbandonware copy of BFME2 with WOTLK expansion works and comes with a guide and fan patches to make it work, I play it all the time

[@MegaGoaty3895]

sup.

[@MegaGoaty3895]

LITERALLY clicked immediately lmfao I love this channel

[@piotrd.4850]

I wish that Total Annihilation from 1997 was preserved with original source code, resources and algorithms. This game was tour de force of desing and coding. On Pentium 166MMX and 32 MB (yes, MB) of RAM it was flying on largest maps and maps of units.

[@dtflo7026]

Had a similar problem with a game called Armor Command. I had to use a VM of windows XP and some 3rd party video drivers to get the 1990s game running properly.

[@Xgamerdad]

Warcraft,C&C, Dune 2000, StarCraft. Played multiplayer with my brothers over serial cable connecting two computers. So fun

[@axnoro]

Ross' game dungeon has been covering this for years. The movement to support old games needs a right-to-repair style of movement, you should get in touch.

[@321Leviathan]

I've played BFME recently and I managed to make it run on windows 10. If you can't get it to run though, there is a fanmade remake in progress happening right now. Now if only I could get the Black & White games to run on my machine, that would be a dream come true

[@jgamer2228]

I care that this is a game from 2006 because my favorite game of all time, Mass Effect, is from 2007. Regardless of the monumental gap in popularity between the two, that is only one year apart. This is a very real issue that I have never considered before, but now I am terrified for the future

[@saltyBANDIT]

You should start a separate channel called “upper echelon reporting” because you, my man, are very much a journalist in my eyes.

[@iamstartower]

this and the fact that steam stopped accepting amex as payment method has moved me 100% to GOG... will never condone abusive corporate practices... always spend your money on cool products not on bad services...

[@junechevalier]

Talking about old games, I remember playing Disciples 2 religiously. It's a game that has impacted me on a personal level. This vid makes me wanna go back playing it

[@ClarkKentai]

When I was a kid, there was a neat little shockwave game called Snowfight 3D. I miss that game.

[@Remigrator]

Up until today, NOTHING beats Command & Conquer Zero Hour

[@montyturner6511]

Great video. And this is why preserving games are better and why going full digital/cloud direction sucks. I wish we weren't going down in this pathway in gaming where games may end abandonware. It's not right man.

[@cameronmactavish6501]

This was something I discussed in our local group recently, but from the context of emulation. I think we're going to talk about the current generation of gaming as a "dark age" where games can't be emulated or saved from oblivion. So many games ship with a zero day patch you can't play without, or are always hooked into an online server that will go away some day. That means that some day when all of these systems are long gone and no longer supported by their maker's networks, these games will simply be unobtainable and unplayable. Even in the situation where you have physical hardware and copies, you might not be able to play. Even Switch cartridges don't contain all of a game, and requires an initial download to install the missing content from the online network. Even worse, which version are you playing, if you do manage to save it? What was the ideal patch number? What patched versions are saved and available for download? There's going to be a lot of lost games from the 36/ps3 era through the current console generations.

[@theforthdoctor7872]

We have been here before, at least in the UK when the BBC decided to just junk hundreds of hours of classic TV because they could no longer make money from overseas sales.

[@Klyze]

And this is why i love Emulatores and PCs in general. you can run every system, even old PC software, worst case scenario with a virtual maachine.

[@ilovemonkeyos]

For BFME II, I had the same issue trying to play downloaded copies and following guides, etc... on my at-the-time a month or two ago fresh-built Windows XP desktop. By pure chance, in buying a lot of old PC game discs for said machine, BFME 1 AND 2 were part of the lot. Paid only like $90 for all of it, and I've been loving playing the games since; never played them before but had always had my eyes on them.

[@TheInternetHelpdeskPlays]

I recently broke a cd of a 20 year old game called freelancer. Its my favourite game of all time. I looked at buying a different cd and it's impossible. It's really sad how all these amazing pieces of history are just left by the wayside. And most people will never hear about these game changers of history and will just wait for the next AAA release.

[@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360]

There are three different categories of online dependency: 1. Just for DRM and updates. Tranformed into forever-offline version relatively easily. 2. Part of gameplay mechanics are transferred to remote server. For example, "shops". Some of them can be removed without any sorrow, some can be emulated with DIY server. 3. Single player game is in fact played on remote server. Not in streaming sense, but, for example, monster drops are stored on server, while monster textures are on local PC. This is the case when game dies with remote server. Theoretically, it is possible to make emulator also in this case, but not every information can be extracted or guessed, which will result in similar, but in fact different game.