What I meant to say is, the extra money gained by copyright terms over the years doesn't usually benefit corporate hired creators much. In such cases it helps the ip owners(in those cases the big corps) make a bunch more money, not help some creator pay their bills and feed their family.

And yeah, that's partially why I wish more creators went independent and that the copyright terms(for corporate owned ips/assets, I mean) were severely cut back.

Abandonware sites should be donated with national budgets.

Even better: all corporate(AAA) made games should be put into a "public library" system for people to dl/play once said games are more than 20 years old

Yes, that would be nice, but currently such libraries have to fight the law because in many cases they have to violate the TOs, have to crack games or write server emulators for them.

... and it should be an international effort really.

There should be a law against the destruction and obfuscation of art.

This is literally what EA is doing with something like American McGee's Alice. They have a modernised build of Alice (that was updated to be packaged with the sequel for modern PCs and consoles), they own all the rights, there is no external licensed music, yet they refuse to sell the game, even on their own store. That is simply evil. There is no other word for it. That is an intentional destruction of art, which is both disgusting and evil. That game should be stripped from their claws and made publicly available via game preservation libraries.

If such a law existed, EA and other scum corpos like EA would immediately start selling their old games.

Have heard Alice is legally Abandoned again since it was withdrawn from selling. just search "McGee's Alice myabandonware" The law is changing in favour of people and to secure art. Plus this art is constantly adored and kept in mind by communities of these sites (including compatibility work)

I doubt that there are no legal problems, since also the classic version can't be found anywhere but on disc and they sell games, that are by far older and don't have such a good reputation. American McGee sometimes has very complicated partnerships. It might be him who says "No".

But then again Microsoft also never ported the excellent XBox360 version of Prince of Persia classic to PC.
Tiny Death Star was removed from the Windows store without notice (gone for good now, can't be found anywhere).
That Gods Remastered is gone, is not much of a loss and this DID happen due to legal disputes. Still it's bad for people like me who bought it in the Windows Store, since the installed files are encrypted and it can't be downloaded anymore. If I ever install my system again, I'll have to use a cracked Steam version.



abandoned ... maybe. But none of these are legal. myabandonedware is fair enough not to host games that are sold somewhere, but they certainly are not legal, just tolerated.

Lost media is certainly not a new concept, but the removal of the ability for legal purchasers to access content is a fairly recent and disturbing trend.

It came with digital distribution.
Before that books were simply not printed anymore, games not produced, stock confiscated.

EA has a sole ownership of the IP, there was no licensed music, it was all written specifically for the game. They still sell the sequel alone on their own store and Steam, they just stopped selling the updated original for no good reason. If you think that they would not delist games without a reason, then look at ultima series. They were about to delist those too, but there was too much negative outcry, so they did a 180 on that. Sadly there was no such outcry for Alice and that's all there is to it.

They do not see games as art, they see games as products. They only value the IP, not the the games themselves. You can't reason with people like that. You also cannot offer money, because whatever sales original Alice would generate, would be peanuts against their football lootbox crap.

Well, abandonware sites are useful when:
a) game can't be bought at digital distribution platforms
b) game can't be found at online auction websites
c) company that made the game doesn't exist anymore.

a+b+c means that game is abandoned and without abandonware sites it would be forgotten and lost forever. In some cases developers changed their games' status to freeware, encouraging to put them on abandonware sites for free download.

I think Seb miswrote, and actually meant "officially abandoned"......i.e. when it's pretty obvious an IP holder has decided to abandon an IP to the digital ether(for a long time or forever) vs. instances where it's harder to figure out if that's the case.

Even "obvious" and "official" are not the same.

We haven't even defined what "abandoned" means. And "obvious" implies that everyone must see it and there is no room for interpretation - which there always is.

Ther's companies like the NOLF's rights holders do not want to publish the game again but are more than willing to sue anyone who will try to sell it.

And then there are some publishers who officially say that everyone is free to play the game and sometimes even publish the game code. And even then they don't officially abandon it, they are the only ones who have the right to sell it.

None of these are abandoned, but you find them on abandonedware sites and it's ok.

I'm sure something like that will happen eventually.

There are film archives all around the world, both private and nationally funded, that do such preservation and education work about films, sometimes even making them available for free.

Of course, the first films were made in the late 1800's, film archives started to become a thing after WWII, so there were many decades in between there.

I think we are "in between" now when it comes to game preservation. There are very few organisations that do it professionally, even less publicly funded, but more and more people are starting to realise that something like that should be done.

^ this ^