is Emulation killing the gaming industry?

[setsunatenshi]

SvennoJ said:

setsunatenshi said:
stupid opinion piece... emulation is probably the only real way old games will ever remain playable for future generations. what kind of lost revenue is being had exactly by emulation?

i have full collections of games from the 8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit eras taking terabytes of space in one of my hard drives. sure every now and then I might feel like playing 1 or 2 of those games just for nostalgia's sake, but most importantly, I want to be sure that no matter what happens in the future, if I or any of my (possible) kids will want to know what it was like back then, I have access to most if not all legacy games without having to buy a new house to store original hardware and software that sooner or later will stop working anyway.

does that stop me from spending probably much more money in gaming per year than 99% of the population? hell no

Prepare to be disappointed (with kids). I have plenty old games too, yet they are far more interested to play with old hardware instead of trying old games on new systems. And even that is very limited. Shiny new games, especially those seen on you tube, is what they want. Same with movies. I have well over a 1000 movies on dvd and blu-ray, spanning 6 decades, plenty of fantasy and cartoons, and all they want to watch is the same few modern ones over and over!

The title is clickbait, it's not killing anything. The questions in the article are legitimate though, why are games treated differently. Why does the movie archive https://archive.org/details/moviesandfilms have to bother with copyrights and not any game archives?

I would say, maybe going forward, the publishers will be better about preserving their older titles and not require consumers to permanently carry on decades old hardware in order to enjoy the games they purchased. That is one of the main reasons why I feel going all digital may be really good. The same way like you can still play PC games from windows 95 era and even purchase them on Steam to play on your modern computer, the console side of gaming should adapt and I really do think it finally is to this reality. I really do expect at least Sony and Microsoft to have a permanent backwards compatibility since they adopted X86 architecture as a standard, and unless there is a massive computational standard change in the future, there should be no reason why my digital Bloodborne copy shouldn't work on my PS5, 6 or 7.

And also there should be no reason why I should purchase the same game multiple times in order to play it on a new hardware. That's on them as publishers, not on us as consumers.

The movie industry had exactly the same problems since the golden age, many movies that once existed are now lost forever. Thanks to emulation, the same will never happen to our golden age of gaming.