TL;DR - Here’s the relevant quote:
“there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
So lemme get this straight… You don’t want people to have fun with your games? That’s why you blocked them from being preserved and why you don’t bother selling them in any capacity? Are you dumb?
Acknowledging the demand, but doing nothing to capitalize on it, is pretty fucking stupid. People already pirate a lot of retro shit because it is literally the only way to obtain them. You wanna stop most of that? Fucking sell them somewhere.
I think the motivation is that it’s difficult for them to show off their newer games to shareholders in a positive light if the old games are doing better. They want people to not dwell on older games and just keep paying money on the next new game, which are often low effort and dragged by the coat tails of some past legacy.
It’s about maximising profit and growth outlook with the least amount of investment and effort, not about providing fair access to their catalogue of products
I don’t know a single investor that would not like a game studio that said “we have a massive back catalog of IP that is raking in cash with nearly no additional development or maintenance cost. We’ll try to keep making new games to keep the IP fresh and see if we hit it big again, but in the meantime, enjoy the money printing machine back catalog”.
It’s basically what Disney does at this point.
And, for that matter, record/music labels. Most records labels lose money on the majority of new artists they sign. It’s the 1-in-10 that break even and 1-1000 that go big and the 1-in-10,000 that fill out huge back catalog they just keep milking.
You are assuming old IP rake in cash, but I assume that the initial purchase is the major revenue along with any DLC. That is the usual model for older games. Live action games rake in continuous cash via micro-transactions and seasonal passes but not any retro games. All the time spent playing retro games is the time they could’ve been playing modern games with micro transactions, is what some publishers reason I reckon.
Fair point. Even music has been turned into a continuous revenue model.
If only old games were as easy to maintain across every conceivable platform like movies and music are.
Thanks to emulators, they pretty much are
For a certain class of games, that’s true.
Worse than making the argument is believing it.
People wanna pay me for permission and a tiny data transfer? They don’t even need me to do marketing or development because it’s already done? Nah, fuck that. I wanna put coal in stockings!
Are you dumb?
When dealing with corporates, I think they need a modified version of Hanlan’s Razor:
“When explaining a corporate decision, assume a close ratio of malice AND stupidity.”
They don’t want old games cutting into their profit.
Ubisoft can use me as an example. The only games from them I’ve purchased in the last six months are Assassin’s Creed 1, Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2, Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
Well, get downloading. I’m waiting…
(If you know of better torrents to seed, let a guy know)
How else are publishers going to charge you for the same game every 7 years?
Not gonna lie I’ve bought Minecraft like 8 times at this point for my 3 kids over the years for various platforms. Most recent was the Switch
Minecraft at this point is one purchase for all platforms
Came here to argue, left with Minecraft installed on my phone
FYI, you can play Java edition on Android using Pojavlauncher.
Yoo congrats. Cubes on the go
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Maybe come up with titles that are more compelling and can be played anywhere? If your competition is retro games you’ve done a shit job.
they want to do planned obsolescence in games.
the original for tech already sucks that nobody ever asked for.
in their minds they already *had *planned obsolescence, until emulation took it away from them.
…leaving over 87% of classic games legally inaccessible through any practical means
Sounds to me like 87% of classic games are now morally greenlit to be pirated and modded to work on modern systems. Fuck the publishers.
To the publishers, scarcity is a resource to be preserved. And destroying old games is as much their right as torching the Warner catalogue is David Zaslav’s.
The logical result of the game industry’s takeover by “Packaged Goods industry” types.
They’re pissed cause the talent that made all their great games have all moved on and they can’t figure it out like indie studios can.
What? How is that game selling!? Theres no season pass, new content isn’t constantly being revolved, and theres no in-game storefront?! This doesnt make sense!
- AAAA Execs
“It only sold 45 million copies. ABYSMAL. (After we spent 95% of the total budget on marketing promising the world’s most flawlessly perfect game ever designed). FIRE EVERYONE.”
Like two months ago
It’s really telling how their shiny new games are so lacking in substance that they are afraid of retro games. ‘Surely it can’t be that out generic mmofps crafting shooter collectathon battle Royale clone game is bad. It must be that damn Tetris game stealing all our sales!’
They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases.
To be fair, as an indie dev one of my major concerns during development has been why someone would buy my game when they could just download a ROM of something in a similar genre. It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t use pixel art.
I don’t know what you are developing, but I mostly play RPGs. And sure, I tend to go towards older games I’ve played and know a lot. But I also picked up Eiyuden Chronicles, Sea of Stars, and Octopath Traveler 1 and 2 and played them through completely.
The issue for me is that new games try really hard to emulate and reference older titles in the genre. They act as a love letter to the original games and, in my humble opinion, end up worse for it.
The developers chase nostalgia and don’t let their games stand on their own two feet. They don’t trust the game they made to be good without being propped up by the old games they reference. They fail to write a compelling and unique story instead of filling them with references to games they loved. In some cases, they try to have all these different systems and mini games that were innovative in their original form, but now are clodged together and fighting each other for my limited attention.
Take Eiyuden Chronicles for example, I loved the Suikoden games and have played them multiple times. But they added every single minigame from the 5 games that came before it as well as adding new ones. I couldn’t focus on the story while trying to navigate all these little systems. I’m not young and with a ton of free time anymore. I don’t want to study in order to figure out some skill tree with hundreds of branching options. I don’t want to feel like I’m missing out on story or game play because 20 minutes in I had to make a decision where I wasn’t aware of the consequences.
Personally, I just want an emotional story that I can immerse myself in without having to study how to play a game or time pressure where I can’t enjoy the journey.
Anyway, if you take anything away from that long winded rant it should be: if you make your game good, trust that it will be able to stand on its own against those old ROMs then people WILL play it and love it. Don’t compare yourself to the past and people falling back to their “comfort games” and make your game as great as you can. Create the game that you love and would want to play and know that others will want to as well.
My game is linked to in my profile. It’s a metroidvania that also takes influence from immersive sims like System Shock and Deus Ex as well as cinematic platformers like Another World and Flashback. It uses a combination of high-definition 2D art (sometimes with normal maps applied for lighting) and cel-shaded 3D graphics.
That sounds like a good mix of things I like, how far along in development are you?
The basic gameplay is working and I’m hoping to get the opening area fleshed out enough to be playable at the Toronto Game Expo at the end of March.
The idiots are acting like we don’t already have it all and they’re just marking themselves to be ignored when they try to hype up their latest cash grab.
The missing piece that very few people want to touch is that, at the heart of the industry (as with all industry), they intend to use games as a mechanism for social control. That becomes extremely difficult if they can’t change and adjust everything in response to modern issues.
Circuses, you say?
But are you also saying they need to impart social ideologies with them? Like what ones? Where you going with this?
Glorifying/justifying war? Or are you talking stuff in the realm of equal representation?
Video games like Assassin’s Creed normalise murdering rich assholes who exploit people.
Video games like Halo normalise thinking for yourself instead of participating in genocide.
Video games like Metal Gear normalise anti-war views and action.
Video games like Mario normalise working class people opposing the unjust actions of kings.
Clearly, Capital and the State have a vested interest in spreading these kinds of sinister narratives.
Hell yeah.
Nice list! Very well done.
I am always impressed about how much I learned about the I.A.E.A from Metal Gear Solid. A fantastic example about how to educate your audience without being “edutainment”.
Sure I had a job to do, bad guys to sneak around, super weapons to sabotage…but boy did I just keep spamming codec calls to hear EVERYTHING those people had to say before I moved on. It was really interesting!
You’re thinking in far too limited a scope. It can be as basic as implanting certain ideas about how tasks are performed through the structure of gameplay.
Hell, it could just be implanting newly developed subliminal messaging through background acoustics, or adjusting the general mood of themes.
Oh, that’s even more engineered and conspiratorial than I was thinking. You’re right.
I mean, it’s just musing on what is possible. Certainly the motive exists to explore whatever is possible.
Hell, if you want conspiracy: They could train a generation from a specific culture on heroic epics, then train another generation of the global population with grievance porn to create villains.
Ah, ok. I was worried the W word was going to come up. 😬
I mean, I do personally think that’s an issue, but I think that it’s an issue which has been thoroughly astroturfed so any time someone attempts to use that term to succinctly describe the issue it evokes an antagonistic paradigm which prevents discussion of the actual issues. That’s actually a great example of how social media and journalism can be used to pre-program the conversation, to prevent real discourse.
The important thing to recognize is that the types of people who do these things will gladly use any issue at all which happens to serve their purposes. Treating the world as though certain issues are always good and other issues are always bad will make you easy prey for those such as them.
