Between DRM, DLC, mandatory connectivity and the end of physical media, the future will look back on this era as the 'dark age' of digital gaming history. Maintaining activation servers, cloud storage and digital delivery costs money. If it doesn't disappear when the title reaches EOL, it certainly does when the company is gone or shifts business models. And draconian copyright laws create legal jeopardy around orphaned games from long-dead companies while the DMCA makes it illegal to remove DRM.
We simply have no way to preserve games.
For now, it's still possible to crack consoles and extract the games from disk. However, we are probably approaching an era where encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.
However, the flip side is that so many games are built using common game engines, and receive multi-platform releases. So there's a broader surface area for potential preservation. Maybe the PS6 version is permanently dead, but the PC version lives on.
Sony in particular is doubling down on platform exclusives again. I was waiting for Ghost of Yōtei to come out on PC, but Sony cancelled the port. We're well and truly fucked without physical media for exclusives like this.
Except Sony is notoriously bad at actually securing their consoles.
It shouldn't be the case that this is relied upon. There needs to be a cultural shift in the industry back to physical - or at least, preservable - media.
The PS5 has been pretty secure (though, not perfect). They learned their lesson from the PS4 and took some pages out of the Microsoft playbook - brought back the hypervisor and implemented e-fuses.
Byepervisor did crack the hypervisor, but it requires an old version of the firmware and the console has to be kept offline to avoid being upgraded. There's no mechanism to downgrade the firmware like there was with the PS4, which limits the blast radius of potential jailbreaks.
Of course, even offline consoles can be updated, since games can ship with firmware updates required need to play the game.
> encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.
I highly doubt this. The platforms that didn't have any jailbreaking scenes weren't because the devices were so secure; it was because there was not enough demand for it. If given enough time, there will always be hacks and bypasses just like Denuvo or hypervisor bypass like the recent hack.
You can doubt this. But the fact is, the Xbox One was secure for it's entire operational life without a crack. And the Series X/S has held up as well.
It's completely possible that future consoles are secure enough that the components fail long before the security does.
>However, we are probably approaching an era where encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.
If AI lives up to its promise then in 5-10 years it should be possible (and affordable) to just point an AI at the screen and let it clone all the graphics, then have it implement the engine.
If the game doesn't run in 5-10 years because of some licensing, DRM, physical, or other SNAFU, then there will be no game for the bot to observe.
Just these big titles. The indie scene is thriving really well. I'd say let AAA die, we don't really need massively expensive cultural production to enable us to tell stories to each other
Yes, those things cost money, but the money that we want to make, we want to make it today. And this is how we make it. What economic incentive is there for preservation?
(/takes off devil's advocate hat and puts on flame suit)
What economic incentive is there for art museums? Maybe society shouldn't be designed primarily around economic incentives.
Nintendo has shown the way, for better or worse.
Tightly managed first party IP with a lot of retro throwback games/compilations/crossovers/virtual console and an overly aggressive copyright approach to managing what people do with their IP (even if fair use).
Nintendo plays the long game. They do not compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and the like.
The win/win scenario I think is recognizing there is a market for the preserved titles and putting the effort in to capture that market. There's effort involved in emulating old games to work on modern hardware.
But yes I think you're on to something that Nintendo plays the long game the best, they handle their IPs like Disney does: featuring them across multiple verticals that feed into each other. Its surprising to me how long its taken Nintendo to come back to movies and TV.
Actually now that I think about it, Disney's biggest shortcoming is their video game division despite many wonderful retro Disney and Lucasarts games at their disposal.
Especially when you have a passionate community willing to work for free to preserve things, am I right?
The economic incentives will only come when enough people stop buying these kinds of games. Whether or not that will ever happen remains to be seen.
Videogame preservation is on par with other media conservation, like literature; something that's an overall good for humanity as a whole, but not in the mind of the majority of consumers of such media. And that's perfectly OK. Most people just want to consume and forget.
Conservation is a social interest amd must come from organized initiatives, it will never take shape magically from individual judgement.
Absolute shame, but to be fair the games that ship on disc without any patches are often in no shape to actually be played, so without the corresponding digital patch infrastructure it's already kinda problematic.
Obviously, preservation is in no way in the interest of the companies, they just want to keep selling you the same game over and over as remakes and remasters ad infinitum
I reckon Sony get a few more years of even more profitable rent seeking before the EU regulates them like Apple’s App Store and forces a game purchase to be valid on all platforms it’s playable on.
I feel like dark age of gaming started with MTX and since then it’s only getting worse. The fact that we have capable hardware like iPad without a very limited gaming ecosystem system itself shows it.
We have so many problems with the gaming unfortunately, in addition to what you already said, MTX, gambling disguised as loot boxes, console and store exclusives, AAA pricing, lack of creativity in the AAA market etc
Game companies should have to submit full copies of everything to run the game , servers and clients to the Library of Congress or Smithsonian for preservation
They should do legal deposit in the country the game is developed. Some places they have to. The Hitman series is in the collection of national library of Denmark.
Why?
Is there a lower form of “art” than always online AAA garbage?
Im not going to lose any sleep over _COD 75: More of the Same Bullshit_ becoming lost media
A lot of lost media used to be considered garbage before it has gotten completely lost. Culture is always worth preserving, at least for historic purposes.
Most art is garbage, doesn't mean it's okay to make it inaccessible by fiat.
That's just, like, your opinion man.
I cannot explain how offensive this is to work of people who work on these games. Years and years of my life working on some incredible AAA games and you call it garbage because it's always online. Like, you think all the effort, all the actual art, music, writing, lore, world building....all of it garbage, because the game is online only? Do you think WoW is garbage and "art" in quotes?
I mean, it's the internet, you can have whatever opinion you want. But imho this is a particularly nasty and unkind opinion.
He thinks AAA games are garbage, not because they are online but because they are AAA. Similar to people's opinions about Marvel films and other high budget productions.
I don't know what you worked on but I'm sure it brought joy to a lot of people.