But how are we going to emulate proprietary online services for games relying on them?
Games preservation should be legally enshrined, and require client and server source code to be published if a provider decides to stop running the online services required to play.
This is a fairly lofty and unrealistic goal. Unfortunately, the right for companies to keep their source code private isn’t going to go away anytime soon and if they were legally compelled to release binaries, the setup for a modern cloud based online experience is not for the faint of heart.
A more realistic goal would be to say that all products should be usable offline (with exceptions for impossibilities like an instant messenger or something)
If the online servers don’t exist anymore, there should be a path to functionality without them. For everything, given the rise of iot especially. If there’s a path to functionality without the online service there’s a path to preserving the game
Private servers are a thing for lots of big games. When the official servers shutdown or go bad, they tend to turn to emulation
Private servers don’t really happen much or at all anymore, “here’s a .exe you can run” idea doesn’t scale on modern online infrastructure well
Emulation is typically a very difficult thing to do, often requiring cracking the original game to get it to work with non official servers and also mapping and building out all the online subsystems. It’s rare.
Well, if your games is popular enough some may start to do revival project or create these custom servers.
Back in late 2000s I rememver my brother who used to play WoW on private server (which unaffiliated with Blizzard) and mostly these unofficial server are popular for MMOs game back then.
Nowaday, you can have something like OpenSpy which emulates GameSpy servers runs by communities. It is all depend how deeper you want to venture each games.
What you can’t preserve is the joy of playing on period correct experience :)
I work with a community that’s spent the last 5 years trying to emulate at least one proprietary online game
There are lots of examples of online services being REd to bring old games back to life, but doing it after the service has been killed off is A LOT of work
If more people captured network traffic of these services before they’re killed it’ll probably make REing the service much easier later
Not that most modern multiplayer games are worth preserving due to their toxic design, but this isn’t a huge issue. BF2 servers started back up thanks to Russians loving the shit out of that game. Warcraft 3 is still very much playable online and NOT on battlenet thanks to W3Connect. Fightcade made 90s 2D fighters playable online. Numerous console emulators support netplay.
If the game is out of print, buying a used copy, even at scalper prices, isn’t going to benefit the original devs or even the publishing company at all. They won’t see a penny of that money.
In my particular situation, my son has an OLED Nintendo Switch and a fairly big, growing library of games for it. Nintendo is already getting plenty of my money. They’re not losing any significant amount of money over my fullsets of NES, SNES, and N64 ROMs, the vast majority of which are not available on Switch Online / Virtual Console.
But what if it’s used to control the railways and the flow of commerce?
The older I get the more I come across excellent content and media that is sometimes hard to get going on modern machines. I totally understand and defend the need for preservation. Like most things in tech I wish the law would catch up and be more reflective of what people want and need. A good place to start would be these copyright laws and friendlier right to repair stuff. Just some thoughts.
I honestly don’t get why people are so obsessed with proving that they are morally correct in piracy.
Like, does it genuinely bother you to think that people out there are looking down on you for this? Is it really upsetting if somebody tells you you’re wrong and for doing it? Why do you feel like you have to prove something to them?
Just do what you’re going to do.
The world is absolute shit, every single one of us is getting poorer and poorer everyday despite making more money, the economy thrives while we get price gouged for everything including basic necessities like homes and healthcare, and we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives in a world actually on fire because some boardrooms wouldn’t let us stop it. I’ve long since stopped feeling guilty for wanting access to some free media.
No, that’s not a justification. The point is there are so many more important matters to be stressed about than whether or not some people don’t like that I pirate things.
It’s not about literally proving that piracy is morally correct - it’s about getting your average person to rethink their gut reaction to the idea of piracy. It’s the same as pointing out how it’s estimated that more than 50% of all games are now lost forever because the companies who made them never bothered to keep the source code. Or how many early BBC recordings only exist because of people who taped them at home and sent copies to them after a public request campaign because the BBC reused the tape reels for newer programming over the years.
The more people who reconsider their first opinion of piracy as a bad thing, the more people who support it and actively participate in that kind of preservation there will be.
It’s about companies that are against piracy for games they don’t sell anymore and don’t provide a way to play them. If they gave us a way to play them piracy wouldn’t be only option.
But even new games can have similar problem because of the price. Main reason why I don’t have any current gen console is because I need to pay hundreds of $ for it plus 80$ per game (they cost that much in my country). That’s insane in my opinion. Two years ago I got second hand moded Wii with 200 games and paid it less than I would pay for just 1 AAA game. I can’t afford (or justify) spending so much money on games when emulation exists.
