Kind of mixed on this one for me. On one hand it’s a win against microtransactions, since a big name like Marvel isn’t enough for people to buy it, so much that it has to be delisted. I think that’s a huge win and I think it’s worth mentioning.
On the other, preservation is a thing and I’m wondering if this game could somehow still be played if it’s taken off the store. Granted I’m not familiar with this game so I don’t know if physical copies work, or if they’re just codes with a plastic shell. Or even if this game would be playable once the servers go down. I know it’s not the best game to keep around, but history deserves preservation, etc
preservation is a thing
so is piracy
also, not everything is worth preserving
What is and isn’t worth preserving is not something that can be known at the time of preserving. The point of preservation is so things can be accessed later if and when they’re needed. Even shitty games like Avengers may be relevant in many ways in the future, even if just to reference as ‘a shitty game’.
I recently saw this video about the British Library. They collect everything that’s published in the UK (books, magazines, papers, leaflets, flyers, …). One of the librarians makes a pretty good case about the use of collecting and preserving everything. Even (or especially) the things you don’t think are worth preserving.
“Good” is not the metric for preserving things. “Important” is. Marvel’s Avengers is important to preserve because this failure is a major historical milestone.
Like, imagine if somehow every copy of ET for the Atari 2600 vanished. Would anything fun be lost? Of course not. But would we lose some critical context in an important historical event? Yes. Very much so.
Fortunately, Atari games aren’t the kind of ephemeral media where we have to worry about that like cloud-service games or pre-code cellulite films.
Is preservation of GaaS actually important though? We’re not talking about niche shovelware that somebody is nostalgic for, we’re talking about preserving a thing that wasn’t meant to ever be preserved, that hurt the gaming industry and represented gaming’s modern backsliding into corporate greed.