Trans CS college student
Will talk about minecraft and celeste at any possible moment.
video games older than 10-15 years should be legally required to open their source code to the public
im not joking btw games we play as kids should be open to study, learn from, and mess around with by the time we grow up. art is built on art built on art and video games are the same
abandonware should also immediately become open source no matter what. if you throw it in the trash im dumpster diving
i agree completely, plenty of games from even ps3 era that are in serious danger of just being lost because games companies don't care enough to archive them
exactly. at some point open sourcing games is going to become the only way entire pieces of video game history don't straight up go extinct. who knows how many already have because they weren't popular or well-known enough to warrant ports or remakes
games that are no longer being sold by the creators should be considered free reign for downloading, sharing, decompiling etc
and by creators i mean the actual people who made it not the company they worked for!! if a company fires everyone who worked on a game they shouldn't get to keep making money off the work of people they kicked out
Not only that, but it's a bit sickening just how often entire source code repositories for games just get accidentally deleted because nobody was working on them anymore and the server they were stored on got wiped for some other purpose (just as one example from my career).
The Petz Community has been wanting to make an open-source re-implementation of the PF Magic Petz games for a few years now. The original devs still have the source code, but the rights to the source code belong to Ubisoft, so they can't share the code without fearing legal action. The community made a petition to Ubisoft a while back, but Ubisoft seems too uninterested in even what scraps remain of the Petz' brand name's corpse to give a shit. As a result, the handful of fans who actually know code (led by Reflet@Yabiko) are slowly, painfully, trying to reverse-engineer the game code directly from the compiled C++ code of the game itself.
In roughly 15 years' time, the game's internal date-keeping systems will cease to work, and it will no longer be able to run properly without, bare minimum, changing your PC's system clock to go years back in time. We need to somehow preserve the game before then. The DOS-based entries (Dogz 1, Catz 1, and Oddballz) are already unplayable without virtual machines; I hope one day we can re-implement those, too.
Petz is a truly unique game series. It has a unique rendering system that attracted a dedicated modding community, and a distinct design philosophy that sets its gameplay apart from other virtual pet games. Something very special will be lost if it ceases to exist.
And that's a 20 year old game with an active fanbase, albiet a niche one. Part of the reason we're still able to play this game at all on modern computers is because of a QoL mod made in 2006 by a programmer no longer in the community. How many PC games from that era aren't so lucky? Neither re-released officially, nor having enough fans to muster up collective maintenance. There was an entire slew of virtual pet PC games from that era that nobody talks about anymore.
And console games, I think, have it worse. And then there's phone games - did you know that there was an entire slew of Professor Layton games for flip phones, released only in Japan? Good luck finding a way to play them. How much games history is buried by a combination of technological obsolescence, and dog-in-the-manger corporations hoarding the legal rights to media while refusing to release it?
if i could pin comments i would but holy hell do i agree. SO much of video game and digital history has probably fallen into the void because of inability to play or engage with it on modern platforms. i loved petz as a kid and so many other games like it. there should be some kind of hard cap on the range of intellectual property and copyright or else a LOT of digital stuff is going to become immediately endangered the second some new medium comes around
God, NR2K3 would be so much easier to work with if it was open source.
the GoldSource and Source engines should be open source (Half-Life, Half-Life 2, etc) but Valve have been so stingy about it. understandably, though, since they've suffered several data and security breaches from 2003 to now, sometimes from people just trying to get source files and source code of their games.
I remember having this exact thought a while back. Some games effectively are open source through community decomp like Mario 64, but Nintendo'll never let go of that
Decomp is still a far cry from the original code. You only get what was left in the finished binary. No names, no scrapped features, no debug stuff that was compiled out.
I don't think this should just be limited to games
any media that's been written off for any reason (looking at warner bros right now) should immediately and irrevocably enter the public domain
if you've officially declared you're not making money off it then you no longer have any moral claim to copyright
also fully agree. while my main point was about games, i was also thinking about that group of scientists who have to use abandonware on their microscope because the company pulled support for the product and the new microscope is well, WELL above their budget. making open source the norm would help EVERYBODY
My friend's lab uses optics analysis software that runs on Windows XP and they literally have a stack of laptops in case the current one breaks
That’s kind of my stance, too. The “kind of” stems from my recognition that without these reforms to copyright, illicitly circulating the tapes will, in the long run, serve to create and sustain the very market which threatens the kinds of works you can only preserve through illicit circulation. Look at what the retro gaming market has become since, oh, 2019.
and furthermore: if there is no longer a way to pay the people who made a game in exchange for a copy of that game, it should be considered abandonware.
Oh how I'd love to rebuild Midtown Madness 2 to run in one resolution, fullscreen or windowed, and on other OSes (also on windows without four different patches XD)
I know this is about video games, but I have to admit… every time Windows insists I uninstall Flash, I tell it no. I know there are better animating programs now, but I can’t let her go…
