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[Plies]

I believe it is important to preserve the original games and documentation, but it is also beneficial to the world, the medium and the content (content to include IP or subject matter here) to continue to build on explore and polish that product to the best state it can be.

Which brings me to my main point:

Preservation without access by the public is pointless.

With the preservation of the original in place the evolution and refinement of content should also exist in parallel and should be just as accessible.

 

[kpopSuperstar]

It's important, but I feel like 99% of stuff is preserved and it's kinda covered.

What games are we talking about getting lost?

 

[Topher]

I believe it is important to preserve the original games and documentation, but it is also beneficial to the world, the medium and the content (content to include IP or subject matter here) to continue to build on explore and polish that product to the best state it can be.

Which brings me to my main point:

Preservation without access by the public is pointless.

With the preservation of the original in place the evolution and refinement of content should also exist in parallel and should be just as accessible.

Voted "somewhat" because although I agree with everything you say, I can't honestly say I feel this is "very important" to me, personally.

 

[Mortisfacio]

It's never really affected me. The only game I've ever had multiple "wish I could play that" thoughts about is Black & White. I'm 34. One game in my lifetime, personally, doesn't seem too bad.

Do we need to preserve Concord? I don't think so.

 

[simpatico]

Been gaming for over 30 years. I've successfully preserved every game I care about with very little effort. Contiguous ownership of said games wasn't even necessary to pull it off. Absolutely zero effort went into it.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

I said somewhat important. Personally it's really rare for me to go back and play old games. The ones I'm interested in mostly have some remaster or improved version on a modern console or PC. (E.g. the Final Fantasy games and SNES/PSX JRPGs).

 

[ReBurn]

It was more important to me when I was younger. These days I'm just too tired to care. I think there are games that deserve to live forever, but it seems like fewer and fewer are released each year.

 

[IFireflyl]

About that important.

 

[Plies]

It's important, but I feel like 99% of stuff is preserved and it's kinda covered.

What games are we talking about getting lost?

A high percentage are endangered.

There's a couple of PC games I remember playing as a kid, that just don't exist any more, except lost in a box in somebody's basement maybe.

Other than that, online games in particular risk losing their player base over time, eventually fading into oblivion . Warhawk for the PS3, for example.

 

[reinking]

10-15 years ago I would have voted very important. The direction gaming is headed now, I believe it is still important but not as important to consumers as it used to be. People are speaking loudly that they do not value ownership. Some of the most popular games are those types of games that have an expiration date. Personally, I do not care enough to fight the trends and willingly hand over the reins to the young gamers like Topher to decide if game preservation will exist in the future.

 

[Plies]

About that important.

You're doing your part to help with game preservation.
That's good.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Preserving games up to this point has been kinda easy, with only a few gems being lost in the abandonware mines but still perfectly playable.

The problems will arise in a few years, when people aren't able to play their favorite game because it depends on some server that shut down a long, long time ago. Case in point could be Dragon's Dogma Online or Monster Hunter Frontiers, pretty cool games that got lost to time until some people decided to put in a lot of work and effort to make them playable again.

Voted very important because I wouldn't like being a dude who can't replay his favorite games in the future.

 

[Topher]

Personally, I do not care enough to fight the trends and willingly hand over the reins to the young gamers like Topher to decide if game preservation will exist in the future.

 

[Magic Carpet]

All get started backing up all the Cellphone match 3 games and all the asset flips.
Anyone willing to take on the farming games?

 

[Plies]

What games are we talking about getting lost?

There's also a Silent Hill game that is locked-in as a PS4 download, meaning that once every PS4 console has perished, the game will be lost forever.

 

[Rush2112]

No in fact I think a lot of current games should be permanently deleted.

 

[Thief1987]

Don't care. It's just videogames there is no value in them to preserve

 

[Baemono]

I have only a handful of game I cannot currently access to them to play them, but it's not that important for me to play them, but would be nice though (pretty much GTA IV and Super Mario Galaxy 2)

 

[Doctor Hades]

I think it is important to preserve the games even if the reality is that many modern games that ship on a disc or even a cartridge are just basically pre-release beta versions that require a day one server patch to bring them up to scatch. This means that at some point in the future when the servers are not active that anyone wanting to play the games will only have the inferior version on the physical media. Still that is better than not having any game at all, right?

I have accepted digital purchases on PC where I have a choice of cheaper third-party keys and frequent Steam Sales to offset the lack of resale value. What I do not like though is being forced toward digital purchases on consoles where the prices are so much higher, sales are less frequent and the games can just disappear overnight due to licencing issues. I also like owning something physical for my money and something I can later sell on if I want to.

As such, the majority of my console game purchases on PS5/PS5 Pro and Switch (and now Switch 2) are physical for as long as I can buy them. I only buy digital releases if that is the only option available for something I want and then they typically tend to be cheaper indie games and whatnot or something heavily discounted in one of the console's rare sales.

Once console games go digital only then I will just stop buying the games and find something else to do with my time (which would probably be to just play games on PC). Same applies to movies which I still buy on Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray discs.

 

[RetroGamingUK]

Incredibly important

I want future generation to be able to experience the masterpieces I grew up loving.

 

[crackajack]

There are very few old games that are truly classics, at least setting a new benchmark for everything after, ideally actually still worth playing today. Those of course. But stuff that was okay or bad on release date... for what?
If it is super easy, barely an inconvenience, we can save Uwe Boll and Mindseye too but will anyone in the future really care about those? Not every piece of art deserves to be preserved, just like memorizing every line of your daily small talk isn't important either.

 

[AJUMP23]

It would just be nice if all media was there at all times to check out when you wanted too. History is important.

Preservation of online games will be a real challenge as servers go away.

 

[Walter Matthau]

Satellaview is an experience I would have never been exposed to if not through the effort of preservationists.

 

[Bond007]

I put my games in a bowl of water and freeze em for preservation.

 

[nkarafo]

I just want to own my games, be able to back them up and play them whenever i want, without relying to anyone else except whoever provides me with electricity.

 

[phant0m]

Important? Yes.

Do I want publishers or platform holders to be in charge of / responsible for it? Not really, because they will do their best to charge ($), limit and control it, or remove content due to 'licensing' nonsense.

I much prefer the semi-unspoken agreement that the emulation community has with pubs that emulators/roms from 2 gens prior are left alone.

PS - please stop pissing off Nintendo by enabling emulation / piracy for their current gen system

 

[YCoCg]

I said somewhat important. Personally it's really rare for me to go back and play old games. The ones I'm interested in mostly have some remaster or improved version on a modern console or PC. (E.g. the Final Fantasy games and SNES/PSX JRPGs).

And how do you think those remasters/improved versions come about? It's by having access to the preserved assets and code.

 

[mayham2199]

I just don't care much. I don't have time to go back and play old games. I barely have time to play the new ones.

I do need mass effect wherever I go but that's it.

 

[Clear]

Don't care.
Not gonna lie.

Given that as a form its barely been around 50 years, and practically every system from day#1 is emulated and its software library archived and widely digitally distributed by online collectors its simply not a problem in my view. Particularly because this is just what is available publicly via the WWW and disregards vaulted content held by IP holders and publishers.

 

[Brakum]

It's cool to have history preserved, but i also couldn't care less personally.

 

[JCK75]

Extremely - one of the primary reasons I'm a PC gamer is I can still play games I purchased during the SNES era.

 

[Robb]

I think it's important to support by principle. But it's nothing I'm engaged in or think about very often. So 'somewhat', I guess.

 

[mopspear]

May we never have the video game version of the lost silent-film London After Midnight. It would be funny if that movie wasn't even good.

 

[Zacfoldor]

It's not that important to me. I don't care.

 

[PlayStaytion]

I'm more concerned about Nintendo and PlayStation, less concerned about Steam and MS games preservation.

 

[Madserb2023]

Used to be but I am getting less bothered. I like the idea of permanently owning content but I also doubt I will care if a game that I own is not currently playable when Im 70.

 

[Connificent]

I was about to give away a lot of old ass PC games on disc but I still had some gems like Unreal and Prey. I am keeping those.

 

[kikkis]

Must be really great experience with 200 players world wide with cheating infested player hosted servers.

 

[phant0m]

About that important.

Your folder is almost exactly the same size as mine lol. Is your library curated or did you go true "archivist" route?

 

[existensmaximum]

I don't know.. Yeah I guess, but who's to be responsible for the preservation and what does preservation even mean practically?

All I know is that I can play any game that has ever been released, one way or another.

 

[SScorpio]

There's also a Silent Hill game that is locked-in as a PS4 download, meaning that once every PS4 console has perished, the game will be lost forever.

That's why emulation is important.


Or play the fan PC port.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3019867267

 

[jzbadblood]

When I hear this war cry for game preservation it sounds like autism. Between emulation and manual scans we're mostly there with everything since Pong. 360/PS3 era emulation will only get better. PS4 is being worked on. We're fine. I don't believe big physical collectors are preserving anything more like hoarding virginity.

 

[Labadal]

I will use Warhammer Quest as an example. Bought via Steam years ago. DLC is accessed via online servers. Didn't try it until this week. Try to access DLC, and none of it works. Why? Because the servers are dead.

The game itself works, but not all of it. I probably own games that don't work anymore.

When all PSVita memory cards die (it will happen), there needs to be a way for people to play Vita games.

 

[IFireflyl]

Your folder is almost exactly the same size as mine lol. Is your library curated or did you go true "archivist" route?

It's an incomplete archivist route. For example, I have multiple versions of the same game, including beta versions.

 

[rm082e]

In the past I would have said "Somewhat", but these days it's not really important to me anymore. With a digital library and all the sales we see out there, I have more games to play than I have time by a factor of 10x. I'm also not really picky about wanting to always have access to some vintage game from my childhood. If I really want to play an old game again, I can always hit up ebay to get the original game and console, or I can just find a ROM online.

I get the argument of "but what if you want to play a game and every possible option to play it has been removed?" If that's the case, I'll just shrug and move on to playing something else. I don't understand this anxiety people have over not being able to play something. It seems like a personality thing.

 

[Londo]

Absolutely, I think everything artistic should be preserved, even the absolutely undeserved and lousiest example.
We don't know in the future what's going to be studied and why, so I see no reason to purposely send to oblivion anything.

 

[Minsc]

If the game's worth preserving it will get a remake every generation along with fixes for any of the controversial decisions as well! Win,win!

Plus they usually make changes to the UI and fonts so the text all feels at home in the smartphone HD era, nice clean perfectly sharp text.

 

[RoboFu]

non public preserved for 40 years then free public use. Or earlier if given consent from IP holder.

piracy is never the answer.

 

[phant0m]

It's an incomplete archivist route. For example, I have multiple versions of the same game, including beta versions.

Nice. Regions too? Mine is all NA releases through gen 6, but only took 1 version of each (usually the original, since back then revisions often removed things). After that stuff is just too big so is more curated (mainly cutting out annual sports titles and shovelware releases)

 

[IFireflyl]

Nice. Regions too? Mine is all NA releases through gen 6, but only took 1 version of each (usually the original, since back then revisions often removed things). After that stuff is just too big so is more curated (mainly cutting out annual sports titles and shovelware releases)

Yes, regions too. For example, my SNES folder looks like this: