251
Can an online library of classic video games ever be legal?
(arstechnica.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
251 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
59390 readers
3289 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I don’t understand why these legacy game license owners don’t start licensing out their old games on the cheap to game services like Apple Arcade or Steam to get extra revenue on them. They learned that lesson in video streaming and it gave a ton of mostly dead IP new life.
Video games were such a wild west back in the 80s and 90s that it's often not clear who even owns the copyright anymore.
There is a lot of abandonware and stuff where the companies just dissolved and ownership of any IP is questionable at best.
But also I don't think there's a way to give Nintendo/Game Freak money to play Gen 1 Pokemon at the moment? There's plenty of stuff like that. Sega and SquareEnix and some others have done a decent job of licensing/re-releasing some games. But there's plenty out there that they 'could' release and seemingly have no interest.
Well in that case, there's nobody to sue!
And ironically when they do offer it, it's always an unplayable buggy mess. For example, Saints Row 2 (2009) on steam appears completely unplayable judging by recent reviews, it crashes to desktop when a mission ends, and they're selling it on sale.
They should just do what Realms of the Haunting 1996 for MS-DOS did and package the whole thing inside of an Emulator.
It's because of how shit saints row 2 and gta 4 are on PC that I use my Xbox to play Xbox 360 games.
Saints Row 2 basically requires the Gentlemen of the Row mod to function on PC. The devs actually hired the modder, IdolNinja, to fix the game proper, but sadly he passed away and the project was scrapped.
I actually couldn't even get that to work for me, TBH. Also, all of the latest versions of GotR got flagged on the Nexus for some reason. Its still clean according to most up to date antivirus, though.
That's a great frickin idea...never crossed my mind
Because there's a chance Sintendo will release another port of that one obscure NES game that absolutely nobody is buying their online service for on their next Gen console. If they license any of their games, how can they rape the consumer financially? Can't you think of the hungry employees at this small indie company that is going bankrupt because little 5 year old Timmy downloaded a copy of a game on N64 Sintendo doesn't even have the rights to anymore?
/S
Cause selling new games is more profitable.
If a new games costs €60 and older games €5 or less (which would be a lot less on streaming services), they'd have to sell at least 12 old games for every new game they sell less cause of this change. And if gamers spend more time on older games, it's highly possible that they'd buy, even just a single game, less.
It's the same with movies or TV. They would only loose money if they make the whole archive available as there is just so much of it that some of the new things could become irrelevant.
Not that I'm against archiving, but it is caused by the creative sector having to have to make money, which isn't easy for smaller players, and greed.
The old games are already made and the new ones are yet to be made.
So one has costs to come out of the profits. The other doesn’t.
I don’t understand your argument.