The Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection just sold a million copies. There’s a demand for preserving retro games, and some either refuse to sell them, because maybe they want you to pay for a subscription service instead of buying just the games you want to keep forever, or sometimes the money it would cost to do the work and put them out as more than just a pack of ROM files is more expensive that the company is willing to invest in the project.
No, the real grim truth about preservation is that both it and piracy have been defeated at the same time via always-online requirements to servers that inherently won’t be running forever. Your favorite game today may not be around for you to show to someone 30 years from now who hasn’t been born yet. What if your favorite movie from before you were born didn’t survive long enough for you to see it?
The Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection just sold a million copies. There’s a demand for preserving retro games, and some either refuse to sell them, because maybe they want you to pay for a subscription service instead of buying just the games you want to keep forever, or sometimes the money it would cost to do the work and put them out as more than just a pack of ROM files is more expensive that the company is willing to invest in the project.
No, the real grim truth about preservation is that both it and piracy have been defeated at the same time via always-online requirements to servers that inherently won’t be running forever. Your favorite game today may not be around for you to show to someone 30 years from now who hasn’t been born yet. What if your favorite movie from before you were born didn’t survive long enough for you to see it?