As an example: I look forward to the day when the license to the "No One Lives Forever"[0] franchise gets sorted out. Through acquisitions and divestitures the ownership to the rights for the game and its sequel have been "lost".
I suppose eventually it'll fall into the public domain, society will collapse, or the heat death of the universe will occur. At least one of those is an eventuality, I think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo...
Where is the SW equivalent? We should be able to gain ownership of abandoned software.
IANAL
All I care is the right to create/distribute copies and derived works
Pretty much all of them.
Your Steam licenses are forfeit when you die and your games and account are non-transferable. So when a game stops being sold anymore, which can happen for lots of reasons, there is a finite pool of licenses that becomes zero over time.
As are your GOG, App Store, Play Store and everything else digital purchases.
By the end of this century anything that was sold on Steam will be long-gone. Much, much faster for the App Store since they charge $100/year and oblige updating apps periodically regardless of if they are necessary.
Although in GOG's defense they alone have mentioned a workaround for this status quo.
> “In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable,” GOG spokesperson Zuzanna Rybacka tells Ars. “However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it, taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen.”
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/gog-will-transfer-you...
Except that GOG gives you a copyable artifact without DRM.
That makes all the difference.
(And if anyone's unfamiliar with First Sale, my understanding is that it basically gives you the right to resell or regift property that you own.)
Furthermore, as I had pointed out to me on here just a few weeks ago, Congress has updated the law to recognize that computer software does not need a separate license to be "copied" into memory to run it; therefore, if you have a DRM-free piece of software, and you die, your heirs are 100% entitled to use that software or give it to someone else, for as long as the hardware they have access to can run it.
Even then, there's so many other things that can go wrong with games. With DOS-era titles, DOSBox does a pretty fantastic job, as long as you use a fork with useful features like DOSBox-X. With Windows titles the possibilities to preserve games is almost endless thanks to hooking. I've spent the past few years compiling a personal archive of games to get them in a playable state. For me, this often involves support for modern controllers and _at least_ natively rendering at a higher resolution. Compatibility shims like dgVoodoo make it easy to bump up the rendering resolution of a game, while preserving aspect ratio for games that may only support 4:3.
Graphics are basically solved with projects like dgVoodoo, and there's numerous dinput -> xinput solutions out there, but that's rarely the whole picture. WinSock could really benefit from a wrapper that tunnels traffic over the internet (VPNs are really like using a steam roller to drive a nail). Registry API calls really could be redirected to read from config files instead of relying on the weird bastardization of WOW64 and the VirtualStore. Hell, even file access could be redirected so we can contain all of a game's files.
I'm actually working towards implementing the latter two as a way to preserve the functionality of installers and allow their reimplementation through something like PowerShell.
They're solving very different problems: executing old games well that they still have the right to distribute vs reinstating access to games that have left circulation entirely (except perhaps abandonware sites). Neither of these is better or worse than the other.
My take on this is that GoG does exactly what I want, let me download offline installers and store them away myself.
Which makes it better at preservation than Steam.
I'm thankful for all the work steam does, including letting you continue to play games that were ripped off the storefront if you own them. I'm just not sure I trust steam in the long term.
On that same note its hard to trust GoG in the long term because they aren't profiting enough off their storefront, hence me keeping all of their offline installers on my own drives after buying a game. (and patch files!)
It gets depressing thinking about how bad we are at game preservation even with all the commercial and hobbyist efforts. I already have too many games piled up with a backlog of "maybe when I get a vacation/retire I can finally get around to these" that won't even be accessible in 30 years.
Preservation in general.
Unlike previous eras we just don't seem to care for the future.
GOG has no such dickery
Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
https://web.archive.org/web/20150927182132/http://www.thegam...
edit: when people tell you the old internet still exists, they're lying. This is yet another site with hundreds of historically valuable articles that I didn't know had disappeared.
And the longer text from the original source: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/when-we-launched-resident-...
Most games are online games now.
Multi-player games depend on servers, economies, and communities that exist only as long as someone's logging in and paying the bills. When those servers go dark, the logic, data, and social fabric disappear with them. Owning the client isn't owning the game. The real thing was the networked experience -- like trying to preserve a concert by saving the recording but not the crowd.
Legal and technical barriers seal the deal. Server code is proprietary and rarely released. Reverse-engineering it breaks copyright law in most countries, so preservation sits in a gray zone. Even when fans rebuild servers, the result is closer to a reenactment than a recovery. And they seldom scale to the heights of the actual game.
Future historians will have YouTube clips and half-working emulators -- fragments of worlds that were never meant to last.
egypturnash•2mo ago
I dunno if it's really preservation when you have to completely rework the game to work on a screen three times wider and 4x denser than anything that existed when the game was designed, and hack in a completely new way of talking to the controllers. Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day. Even if they're still both running versions of Windows, a 2025 computer and a 1997 computer are completely alien systems that have about as much to do with each other as a 2025 computer and a Nintendo 64.
PaulHoule•2mo ago
I remember working at a library field where there was a tremendous amount of concern that digital assets like floppy disks and files would become 'unplayable' over time.
You might not be able to pay people to do it but the video game emulation community shows that it can be done as a labor of love.
Firehawke•2mo ago
sumtechguy•2mo ago
Had one game from a few weeks ago that I could not get to run. Turns out it was an intel video driver bug. Really old intel driver worked. One from 2 years ago didnt. One from a few weeks ago did. Old nvidia worked, newer ones broken. One windows box worked the other didnt. Shims like dgVoodoo2 and dxwrapper help to a point But still have lots of issues. Then on top of that if there is a online component the game will at best hang/timeout at worse crash out. Have one game if I open the leaderboard on it will crash the game. The board was apparently turned off 15 years ago.
xandrius•2mo ago
If it runs on a runnable emulator of the target platform then we're good.
entropicdrifter•2mo ago
So in the interest of making older games future compatible we (those interested in preservation) do need to pursue those things.
How else can we guarantee they'll run on future devices? Emulators are one good way to make things run on newer devices, but emulators will in turn need the features to be able to run on 4K/8K screens, XR devices, etc.
hamdingers•2mo ago
> Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day.
This is indeed one of the ways GoG ships games, but it doesn't work in all cases.
1313ed01•2mo ago
Legal, non-free, operating systems to install in those virtual machines is trickier. No old freeware version of Windows (yet?). Installing a minimal Linux distribution with WINE, for games that can be made to run in WINE in QEMU, might be the most stable way to preserve a 1997-era game. Except for 1997 DOS games (there were surprisingly many still being published in 1997!) that run so well in DOSBox(-X).