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"Video Game Preservation" is a Mere Pretext for Piracy... and a Poor One at That
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Because when you have games available for the average person to easily download, play, and therefore discuss and expose even more people to them, it's the most effective way to keep older games alive in the consciousness of the gaming public and among people interested in researching the history of the medium.
There's no way that even a fraction of the games of the past are going to end up in somewhere like a physical museum or be commercially re-released. And while I think museums are a good idea, I wouldn't want those relatively few museum creators hand selecting a certain number of games to display while thousands of other games disappear because no one hosted them on the internet and no one ever talks about them.
I don't think people should pirate current gen games but for stuff that's never going to be re-released (like the vast majority of 8-bit tape/floppy disk stuff), piracy is illegal but harmless and beneficial.
"Preservation" isn't just about making sure copies of obscure games don't disappear; it's also about providing a platform to help bring more exposure to them, to get more people to actually play them.
I see your point OP, but you missed a little tiny important bit...
You dont consume all the medias you listed the same way as a game.
Visiting a museum to see a painting is a feasible thing. Heck you often have reproductions of these. You can even see them on the internet. And multiple people can do it at the same time, it'll barely take 20 minutes.
For movies ? It's harder but still possible since a movie can be enjoyed in a theater with many people at the same time in 2 hours.
Tell me how you can do the same for video games.
Tell me for exemple how can we do that for a 50 hours long RPG, considering video games involve playing by yourself ?
I'm not rooting for piracy, but let's be honest:
Copyrights laws are fucked up in some cases.
And if it werent for some sites, I believe some games would just disappear.
You dont consume all the medias you listed the same way as a game.
Visiting a museum to see a painting is a feasible thing. Heck you often have reproductions of these. You can even see them on the internet. And multiple people can do it at the same time, it'll barely take 20 minutes.
For movies ? It's harder but still possible since a movie can be enjoyed in a theater with many people at the same time in 2 hours.
Tell me how you can do the same for video games.
Tell me for exemple how can we do that for a 50 hours long RPG, considering video games involve playing by yourself ?
I'm not rooting for piracy, but let's be honest:
Copyrights laws are fucked up in some cases.
And if it werent for some sites, I believe some games would just disappear.
Good! Stealing is stealing, and it's a good thing this happened.
Imagine believing that, lol.
It goes to show you how good these companies are at preserving their own stuff. And that's a Mario game.
I would rather people be honest: "If my favorite company can't make money out of you selling old stuff, I rather like things being lost in time"
I feel like you're conflating preservation efforts (digital backups) with piracy (ROM sites) simply because it suits your narrative better.
Companies should be taking steps to preserve their own works and make them readily available to people. If they cannot or will not do so, someone will do it in their stead and distribute it as they see fit.
Companies should be taking steps to preserve their own works and make them readily available to people. If they cannot or will not do so, someone will do it in their stead and distribute it as they see fit.
At least they obeyed whatever the law was at the time, that's what matters!
Reading the thread, it really seems the main thing that most posters disagree, and frame their arguments, on is the accessibility part of game preservation.
If you believe accessibility is the most important part, then roms site can be considered critical to game preservation and thus cannot be lost.
If you believe accessibility is just a part of it, or that it can be limited, then roms site can go from being unimportant to being an issue in the industry.
If you believe accessibility is the most important part, then roms site can be considered critical to game preservation and thus cannot be lost.
If you believe accessibility is just a part of it, or that it can be limited, then roms site can go from being unimportant to being an issue in the industry.
Tbf, those methods gave rise to different groups that created ways to preserve the different mediums in legal ways, which is what organizations like in the op are trying to do.
But corporations and creators aren't entitled to copyright protection, either. It's not their right to stop people from copying and sharing their work so the largest number of people can benefit from it. By default, all works are in the public domain; it requires giving a creator or corporation access to a huge bureaucracy and the enforcement and protection of the courts to work, none of which the creator or corporation pays for. The people decide to grant a legal privilege to creators because it is in their best interests to do so, because it encourages the creation of more works. The only entitled actors in this situation are corporations who assume they are entitled to property in their intellectual products, instead of this being a favor, monopoly, and subsidy granted to them on the condition that it serve the public good.
It should be blindingly obvious that our current system of intellectual property does not serve the public good. This is true even of legacy media, but it is especially true of a medium that has preservation challenges, like video games. IP only exists to enrich the public domain in the first place; originally, you'd make a map, say, and give it to the library of congress, and they'd keep a copy, and give you the exclusive right to copy that map for the next 14 years. In exchange, the library of congress (or patent office) would have a copy of your map on hand, and once the copyright term was over they would make it available to anyone who asked. The fact that this made more things enter the public domain was the only reason the copyright was granted in the first place.
So, no, we are not entitled to play any game we want, and we're not owed access to them. But neither are corporations entitled to deprive the public and posterity of works that that should be in the public domain on the off chance they might profit from it 70 years after its first creation. By any reasonable standard, the public loses much more than they gain by allowing orphan works to wither on the vine; the number of works made possible by being able to sell them 40 years after publication is minuscule, while the public has a significant interest in ensuring they are preserved. These copyright terms are the law, and were lawfully enacted, but we don't have to, you know, like it. They are lawfully enacted laws that pervert the purpose of IP law in the first place and, in the final analysis, represent private actors looting the public treasury for their own gain. They could only possibly be passed by a legislative process that is so captured by private interests that it can't claim democratic legitimacy. We should still obey it in the meantime, because it's, you know, the law, and the solution is to change it, but that doesn't mean we need to accord it an ounce of respect or assent more than we have to. And condescendingly lecturing citizens on entitlement while entitled Disney executives cut 7-figure bonuses based on selling works that were created long before they were born accords this dirty process much more respect than it is entitled to.
Be right back, I'm going to buy my 800 usd Panzer Dragoon Saga copy from a scalper just because Sega let that game to rot on a system that has a high probability to die soon.
Am I cool enough for you, Era?
Am I cool enough for you, Era?
The two arcade/console game publishers everybody else needs to be looking at in this regard are Sega and SNK as far as I'm concerned.
Both are basically doing a shotgun approach, releasing dozens of emulated classics on every platform under the sun -- all the modern consoles, PC, and even their own mini consoles. What's best is if you buy the Genesis and SNK classics on PC, you can just take the ROMs out of the files. I wish the likes of Capcom, Konami, Square Enix, etc., could be convinced to do this for their back catalogs of that era.
Both are basically doing a shotgun approach, releasing dozens of emulated classics on every platform under the sun -- all the modern consoles, PC, and even their own mini consoles. What's best is if you buy the Genesis and SNK classics on PC, you can just take the ROMs out of the files. I wish the likes of Capcom, Konami, Square Enix, etc., could be convinced to do this for their back catalogs of that era.
peltz i love you but you're a madman
no museum is gonna capture all the licensed stuff lost to the ages without MAME/etc, we literally only have some films because collectors held onto them forever and someone decided to share - ive read numerous articles on even criterion pieces coming of this
yeah i'm largely with this guy
i own snatcher, panzer dragoon saga etc but everyone should play those, and not have to fork over like a stack to an ebay reseller to do so, that's dumb and benefits no one
no museum is gonna capture all the licensed stuff lost to the ages without MAME/etc, we literally only have some films because collectors held onto them forever and someone decided to share - ive read numerous articles on even criterion pieces coming of this
yeah i'm largely with this guy
i own snatcher, panzer dragoon saga etc but everyone should play those, and not have to fork over like a stack to an ebay reseller to do so, that's dumb and benefits no one
"people should have the right to freely check out old works" is literally the entire idea of the public domain, admittedly a concept that has been broken to the point of practical non-existence in the US thanks to corporations rewriting copyright law in their favor
This is a great way for me to be able to identify what people really, really like stanning for rich people. :v
I'll play the devil's advocate and bring forth the theory that retro gaming wouldn't be as anywhere near the phenomenon that it is today without the emulation scene/piracy.
StarFox 2 wouldn't be in the SNES Classic if it wasn't for leaks of the beta rom making its way onto the Internet.
The PlayStation Classic uses a freeware emulator that exists because of the emulation scene.
The progresses in emulation, including but not limited to save states, filters, rewind, etc were all perfected because of the emulation scene.
The main reason why so many people want those games on official channels is because they played them on PC illegally to begin with. No sane person is going to spend the hundreds of dollars asked to get a legit copy of Little Samson.
Fuck this.
StarFox 2 wouldn't be in the SNES Classic if it wasn't for leaks of the beta rom making its way onto the Internet.
The PlayStation Classic uses a freeware emulator that exists because of the emulation scene.
The progresses in emulation, including but not limited to save states, filters, rewind, etc were all perfected because of the emulation scene.
The main reason why so many people want those games on official channels is because they played them on PC illegally to begin with. No sane person is going to spend the hundreds of dollars asked to get a legit copy of Little Samson.
Fuck this.
I can't say it's morally wrong or something that severe but there I find it weird the options are "pay a lot" or "pirate" for some. The ease (and true lack of any real harm) of pirating digital goods means the "not having access" is just not something that enters people's minds. Games are corporate works by large numbers of people though (usually) so I guess it's different than pirating some music that a single artist has purposely chosen to limit access to.
It also feels like the conversation is way more intense than it needs to be when one considers the amount of basically accepted piracy that goes on. Yeah company x has not made that obscure PC engine CD game available on modern platforms, but they also don't see to care about you downloading it, so why are people screaming at one another.
I do research on games preservation too don't call me a bootlicker pls.
It also feels like the conversation is way more intense than it needs to be when one considers the amount of basically accepted piracy that goes on. Yeah company x has not made that obscure PC engine CD game available on modern platforms, but they also don't see to care about you downloading it, so why are people screaming at one another.
I do research on games preservation too don't call me a bootlicker pls.
This forum must have a lot more republicans than I thought considering all the hatred for poor people in this thread.
Next you people are going to try to convince me that libraries should be illegal because it's unethical to read books without paying scalpers huge fees for the last few copies in existence
Yeesh
Yeesh
Don t limit yourself to well spread games, think of the very limited pcb runs of some arcade games.
Without the hard work of those who decap, photograph the cells and painstakingly write bits one at a time, a lot of gems would be lost forever even for the ip holders when components rot destroy the data of all copies(old ips switch hands but storages are emptied/contents sold for scraps).
Reverse engineering IS the only way to preserve some of the games.
Necessary ? No, like it was not deemed necessary to copy some of the original negatives of lost film gems, to our great chagrin, and family of the actors cannot witness the greatness of their ancestors a century later.
Without the hard work of those who decap, photograph the cells and painstakingly write bits one at a time, a lot of gems would be lost forever even for the ip holders when components rot destroy the data of all copies(old ips switch hands but storages are emptied/contents sold for scraps).
Reverse engineering IS the only way to preserve some of the games.
Necessary ? No, like it was not deemed necessary to copy some of the original negatives of lost film gems, to our great chagrin, and family of the actors cannot witness the greatness of their ancestors a century later.
I'd like to stress the excellent posts below, two of which providing hard data to back up their arguments.
Let's for a second take out all considerations of copyright, laws and whatnot.
From a purely moral standpoint, downloading games that LITERALLY do not exist on any current medium. As in, the game will be lost to history otherwise. Is not immoral, at least you would have a hard time trying to explain how it is.
Has nothing to do with entitlement and certainly has nothing to do with sports cars.
Please note that I am ONLY referring to games that cannot be bought still. For example I can buy Super Metroid on my 3ds, so this game would NOT be okay to download. On the flip side, many other SNES games would be lost forever without "piracy".
I think the comparison to the movie industry below is an excellent example that is not dissimilar to how videogames will be lost in the future if ROMs didn't exist. It's heartbreaking to think of all the thousands of early films pre 1950s will never be seen again. I have some film buff friends that literally cry when some long lost film is miraculously found and uploaded online (preserved, so it is never lost again).
Again, I want to stress that downloading ANY game that can be bought new still (whether it's the latest disc based game or a re-release of Mario Bros on the Switch VC) is absolutely piracy and wrong.
I also want to stress that Rom sites are absolutely in the wrong generally speaking, because they host games that can be bought alongside games that cannot. It would be nice if there were more sites that specifically only hosted games that would be lost to history if they were not uploaded. Unfortunately that is too much to expect from humans these days. Everything runs on greed.
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IIRC isn't this completely false? I thought the ROM that was included in the SNES Classic was completely new and from Nintendo's vaults and very much different from the leaked beta ROM.
Nobody is saying illegal ROM sharing is the only way games can be preserved.
It's just the only way a lot of games HAVE BEEN preserved.
It's just the only way a lot of games HAVE BEEN preserved.
People can just call most piracy motly harmless and leave it at that. Not sure why some are trying to frame the argument in a way to imply that most games piracy are the world's destitute downloading games that can only be found for $2000. I'm sure most of the most pirated titles for most retro consoles are affordable.
Nah, we should trust companies such as Square Enix, who lost source codes of games released in 2000 and more such as Final Fantasy IX and Kingdom Hearts lol.
I don't think he mean that is the same game, but that the leak popularized the game and showed Nintendo there was a demand for it
It is against our terms of service to advocate piracy, so I don't think that this sort of topic can be productive on this particular forum, given the prohibitions present if someone was to take the counter view to the OP's. While the opening post makes sure not to equate emulation or games preservation in general with piracy, that isn't the case for some of the replies in this thread, and I am seeing name calling on both sides now. Hence the lock.
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