Warner Brothers' greedy Microtransactions in Shadow of War.

[librarian13579]

Cerebralbore101 said:

librarian13579 said:

Hey, I'm really glad you use our service. You may have verified some of the games that I've personally dumped myself, haha.

I think it's incredibly sad that future libraries 100 years from now will have the entire library of PS1 and PS2 games available for perusal once it all hits the public domain...but so many PS4/XBO/PC games will be either broken or lost to the sands of time. It's always depressed the hell out of me that so much of the early history of our art form will be lost....similar to 90% of the black-and-white movies from the 1890s-1920s that are now gone forever out of sheer neglect.

You guys are acting like physical disks won't last 100 years from now. Is there something I don't know about this? We have paintings that are 500 years old sitting in museums. Why won't there be 500 year old copies of game disks in the future? 

Fundamentally, in order to keep our medium alive for future generations, discs need to be dumped, hashed, and stored in secure databases for future dissemination.

That's INCREDIBLY tough to do when more and more developers are turning towards primarily-online-multiplayer games in persistent worlds, like Bungie, BioWare, Blizzard, Valve, Rockstar, etc.

Inevitably, some of those games will not be able to be properly preserved, even if we try our best to round up all of the day-one patches and microtransactions and DLC. As more and more games become like that, more and more titles will inevitably start to be lost.

It's already been happening with some old MMORPGs like the original version of Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, and with some early-PS3 games like MAG. And it's expanding outside of MMORPGs to encompass an increasingly greater share of gaming. What happens when 50% of games are GAAS, persistent world games that require server-side game engine logic to properly function? That's right----it all vanishes into the ether the moment Activision Blizzard / EA / Take-Two decide it's not profitable anymore.

Our art is taken hostage by the clutches of massive corporations who are only held accountable to their shareholders.

And what happens when they finally take the step and pull a Simcity 2013 on us or a Diablo III on us....and require that the SINGLE-PLAYER game always be connected to the Internet? That's when game preservation becomes simply untenable.

I don't bother with systems after the 6th gen. I know that 99.9% of everything (minus a few titles like Final Fantasy XI) can be preserved right up to that point. Anything beyond that is uncharted territory.