[Disclaimer: I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that this would make a great piece and excitedly jotted down some notes. At some point between then and now, perhaps following an ill-advised browse of some comments sections, I lost the will to try and write anything decent, or to try and generate, or participate in, any kind of discussion on the subject.
I’m adding it now because I still think it’s relevant to our area of interest, and I sort of want to get it off my chest, but if I were you I’d just scroll down to the links at the end.
Oh, and in case it doesn’t go without saying, the views expressed below are my own and do not represent those of the FFG board.]
I once wrote on FFG (article now deleted) about feeling conflicted when LucasArts re-released The Dig and Full Throttle for £15 apiece (this was in about 2004 I think). I was glad you could buy them again, but thought that £15 was pretty steep. In the end, I came down on the side of being pleased – I didn’t want to say that copying games was justified if you thought they were overpriced.
Having said that, while I love what GOG do, and accept that by no means are their prices prohibitively expensive, I’m not sure how I’d feel if each and every game currently left in the wilderness was made available to buy for $5.99 or $9.99. There comes a point when you stop being delighted at the fact that old games are being made available again and start to question, as you would with any other financial decision, whether buying a fairly crappy old game (let’s take our most recent review, Guilty, as the sort of thing we’re talking about) was worth paying more for than comparatively modern flash-whizzo ones.
Without abandonware to sustain interest in old titles, there would be no market for anybody to come along, exhume and monetise them. Yet I accept that abandonware is a murky area, and though I support it, there has always been an element that treats it as an excuse to get something for nothing. There are probably hundreds of games released in the last fifteen years or so that could be called ‘abandonware’ but for a variety of reasons, and to my immense relief in my capacity as Abandoned Places updater, no-one is looking out for these and putting them on their websites for download.
If more recent games are becoming harder to source, then that is of course a problem, and you could argue that they need to be preserved too. I guess I just feel more comfortable applying the term to really old games, just to distance myself from anyone who wants to use it to justify torrenting newer titles, and making it more likely that no-one involved with making the game will be morally or financially put out by it being freely circulated on the internet.
On that point, there are those who claim that the chances of the original developers ever seeing any money from old games are slim to none, and so anyone who gets too pious about copying games might want to think about why they are defending publishers’ rights to cream off some more profit, with no further effort, many years after the fact. That’s an area that I’m personally reluctant to get into: generally, I like to buy stuff legitimately, but when I do, I don’t worry about where the money goes – life’s too short.
This kind of talk inevitably leads the discussion to intellectual property, copyright law, and comparisons with the film and music industries. Frankly, that’s not somewhere I want to go. I’ll link to some articles that prompted this post, and advise you to read them, but not the comments. I wish I had the wit and motivation to parse a longer and more intelligent piece, and to participate in any ensuing discussion, but I don’t.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (January 29, 2014) – in which John Walker reveals some conflict regarding GOG (which are similar to my own thoughts above) and casually mentions that he thinks old games should enter the public domain.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (February 3, 2014) – having sparked some kind of comments-frenzy with his earlier remarks, Walker follows up with a lengthier editorial piece on the topic. Another comments-frenzy ensues (don’t read it).
Here, indie developer Simon Roth lists some games for which the developers no longer receive payment.
And finally, veteran games journalist Stuart Campbell writes about how piracy and emulation are essential for preserving gaming history.
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Public domain really needs to be revisited by the courts, especially in this age of ageless, eternal corporations. But frankly, we all have bigger issues to worry about.
In the meantime, it comes down to everyone’s own personal moral code – just like piracy itself. I follow the same basic rules and don’t download anything new, not out of fear, but because I can afford to support those developers. I have no issue rebuying a game on GOG because the price is almost always right, for the sheer convenience (even if I’m looking at the CD release I already own), and especially if they’ve put the work into patching and collecting the resources you need to make it work on a modern system.
And when Steam does silly things like releasing Decent 2 for $10, I feel confident enough people will wait for the inevitable sale to get the message across. Either way, as long as options are available to purchase games legit, and no one is being sent to the gulags over the games that aren’t legally available, then I think the current situation is fine for now.
February 24, 2014 @ 5:08 am
Ok, so I guess this counts as participating in the ensuing discussion, but…
You’re right, there’s not a lot wrong with the status quo, and it’s better than it used to be.
The public domain thing is interesting though. I bet a lot of developers would release their old games as freeware, if only it was in their power to do so.
February 24, 2014 @ 1:51 pm
I strongly noticed this kind of magical 15-years line – most of the abandonware sites dare not cross – during last year’s 1998 theme of The Good Old Days. While there are a couple of sites, that offer games from around 2000, there are next to none which care about the post-millennium ones. That is if they aren’t outright warez-sites.
And here are my guesses for some of the reasons why:
1.) CD-ROMS are a lot more durable, so you don’t have to worry about bad sectors or I/O errors. If you didn’t give the games away chances are high you can still play them today… that is if you don’t have problems with getting them to run, which brings us to:
2.) DOS was around for a really long time, so at the beginning of the abandonware movement you had almost no problems at all (except for too fast PCs) to start up most of the old games. And for non-DOS games there were quite decent emulators even back then. But try to start up a Windows game from around 1998 nowadays… you can count yourself lucky if you just have some driver issues. Funnily with the advent of DOSBox DOS games are still a lot easier to handle than native Win95/98 ones.
3.) Back in the high days of abandonware most companies weren’t quite ready for the internet, but they definitely caught up by now, so at least for the most popular games it’s hard to call them abandoned anymore.
4.) The internet got a lot more commercial, concentrated and standardised. Those pioneer times were users created sites for users are long gone, for better (just think of all that awful GIFs) and worse (you didn’t have to worry about the data krakens). Nowadays you must be on that net 2.0 thingies in order to get any kind of attention. Why bother creating your own site when everything you would ever need is either on Steam or GOG?
February 25, 2014 @ 6:08 pm
Is there also maybe a simple question of bandwidth? More recent games are on average going to be larger – as we moved into the 2000s, DVDs became the standard medium on which games were sold – and thus lead to higher hosting bills for abandonware site owners.
February 26, 2014 @ 4:02 pm
Well, *in* 1998, the discussion in “Abandonware” circles was whether the magical line should be drawn at three years or five years ago… seriously, that was one of the main discussions on the forums back then! Nowadays, even 15 years is still considered fairly recent. So the non-movement of those circles are indeed evident. For whatever reason and, yes, for better or worse.
February 26, 2014 @ 9:24 pm