For whatever reason, back when Cyberpunk 2077 released, I downloaded the game via standalone installer. It's cumbersome, and difficult to maintain. Something like over twenty ~1 GB files, some of which corrupted on download and needed to be redownloaded. And without being connected to a service like Steam, this route of installation also meant that patching was solely my responsibility. It was a pretty miserable way to do things, and very inefficient compared to letting a service manage it for me. Every patch, every hotfix, every minor change was another installer that I had to seek out, download, and apply. I'd not even get notifications for new versions - I had to go looking.
So I did. I downloaded the installer files for every version from 1.0 forward. Every patch. Every hotfix. It currently takes up around 309 GB just for installer files. That's without having yet downloaded the newly released version 2.0 - Which, by the way, has no patch. Just a stand alone installer for version 2.0 at something like 38 GB.
So why would I do that? Honestly, Cyberpunk isn't even a game I consider all that great. It's not as awful as some panned it to be (gameplay wise), and I found it enjoyable in certain regards. But it's nothing phenomenal, and they certainly misunderstood the genre from a storytelling perspective. So why collect all these files?
Because now those files are completely unavailable online. Period.
If you go reading the forums for the game, there's a ton of folks talking about how version 2.0 completely messed things up for them. Broken save files. New bugs. Worse performance. And people are asking for a way to go back to the last stable version - And the answer is too bad, you can't. As far as the developer is concerned, that version no longer exists. Since version 2.0 changes a hell of a lot about the game, effectively a drastically different game just evaporated off the official website.
Forever.
It's pretty shitty.
When I was first downloading the game, I suspected something like this would happen. I surmised that there would be a reason to want to go back, or preserve outdated versions, and that access to them would be pulled.
It's not because I'm clairvoyant. It's because this. Just. Keeps. Happening.
Old versions of Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, etc? You sure can't get those anymore. Ditto for older versions of many popular online games - but those are dead and gone for good.
I don't know why I'm bringing this up. It just feels like it's a pretty shitty state of affairs. Why do we have to be the archivists? Mostly because no one else will.
