e(Ag)le on Nostr: A new study shows a whopping 87% of games released prior to 2010 are no longer ...
A new study shows a whopping 87% of games released prior to 2010 are no longer available for sale or download by any means other than the second-hand market and archival/"piracy": http://gamehistory.org/87percent/
Proof if you ever needed it that the community is doing the work that corporate interests won't do to preserve gaming history and the slice of culture it represents.
We are living in an age when it is so astonishingly cheap to keep copies of things around and yet the perverse incentives exist for companies to memory-hole anything that doesn't perform well or that might compete with newer offerings.
IMO, in the big picture this is what legislation is for, correcting a horrible tendency that the market will have if left to its own devices, and there should absolutely be legislation protecting archivists of content that's no longer available for sale, or even requiring that content creation companies keep content available in SOME form. Until then, we depend on each other to do this.
Proof if you ever needed it that the community is doing the work that corporate interests won't do to preserve gaming history and the slice of culture it represents.
We are living in an age when it is so astonishingly cheap to keep copies of things around and yet the perverse incentives exist for companies to memory-hole anything that doesn't perform well or that might compete with newer offerings.
IMO, in the big picture this is what legislation is for, correcting a horrible tendency that the market will have if left to its own devices, and there should absolutely be legislation protecting archivists of content that's no longer available for sale, or even requiring that content creation companies keep content available in SOME form. Until then, we depend on each other to do this.