quwyou.com

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

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

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?

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

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

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…