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.
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.
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.
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.
