87 percent of classic games released in the United States are out of print

[TCD]

https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/

Quite an interesting read (at least for me ). Maybe one day the preservation of video/computer games as an artform will get different sets of laws than just copyright.

[alexh]

Interesting. Either the method they used to "measure" whether or not a classic game is out of print is wrong. Or the total number of games that go "unnoticed" must be huge.

I intend to read the full article when I get the time.

https://zenodo.org/record/7996492

The graph says that less than 20% of games published between 2005-2009 are available to purchase today. That seems extremely low. That was the PS3/Xbox360/Gamecube era.

For example large amounts of games on the PS3 platform were ported to the PS4 platform (and PS5 platform) and are available online today. Large amounts of PS3 games available on the top PS Plus subscription. Xbox backwards compatibility and gamepass availability is even better.

I suspect the article concentrates on the closure of the Nintendo 3DS/WiiU eShops. A move that still today strikes me as crazy. I completely understand they can't accept credit card purchases on those platforms anymore because it costs too much to maintain the software security but they should have moved purchasing to another platform (Android/iOS) and allowed purchases and downloads of classic systems to continue. Or at the very least facilitated all the games to be bought on the Switch platform first.

[TCD]

They count re-releases and remakes if they are not 'substancially different' as in print, so there's that.

Edit: Here is another TL;DR version https://www.gamedeveloper.com/cultur...is-unavailable

[alexh]

It's total and utter bollocks. Both articles. GOG is supplying pretty much every top selling game of that Era on the PC. Xbox Live Gamepass is supplying the Xbox versions (xbox360 backwards compatibility) and the same goes for Playstation 3.

It's just Nintendo.

Not to mention that "unofficial" preservation of pretty much every platform has happened. (i.e. you can download pretty much any game, any platform of that era for Emulation, optical disc drive emulators, burn to disc)

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by alexh

It's total and utter bollocks. Both articles. GOG is supplying pretty much every top selling game of that Era on the PC. Xbox Live Gamepass is supplying the Xbox versions (xbox360 backwards compatibility) and the same goes for Playstation 3.

Top selling/popular games are only a fraction of entire platform libraries. I think when taking that into account the 10-20% number of games available in retail now could be realistic.


And yeah, of course the unoficial preservation covers about 80-99% (my rough estimate) of a given platform library, but they did not take this into account.

[TCD]

You have to keep in mind that this comes more from a legal point of view. So far preservation isn't exactly legal as only the copyright holder could do it legally (main reason why SPS couldn't share their preserved disks). i think the main reason of that article is to point out that it is important to create a legal way to preserve older software and make it accessible to people that want to research it.