this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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You'll lose access to games by virtue of lack of support. Systems will change, libraries and dependencies will fall out of sync with requirements, and "the games you love" will be forgotten by devs (though not in all cases).
I used to play a really fun game on MacOS (pre-X) called Glider Pro. There was no easy way to play it, since you'd have to emulate a MacOS 9 system. Only recently did the original devs upload the files to GitHub and open the source. Some smart people then forked the repo and made it playable on various systems.
And that's just one game. Lots more are now lost to time, and yet we've all collectively been able to continue gaming.
This sort of argument is just a way to cope with the erosion of customer rights and the overreach of corporations over digital media as if that's some inevitable entropy of the universe type of thing. We still have books that are thousands of years old, but even though we have better technological means to store and reproduce media than ever, arbitrary legal hurdles are leading people to treat cultural loss as an inevitability.
You got your answer in your own response. Emulators are a thing. Virtual Machines are a thing. Proton is a thing. We figured out how to recover games going as far back as the Atari. Unless actively and fiercely obstructed people will figure out how to keep these things available out of sheer passion and goodwill.
A DRM-free installer/executable for a game, when properly backed up, will still be playable most likely indefinitely.
Unfortunately, as the mention of DRM itself indicates, obstructions are plentiful and ever increasing. This is why supporting DRM-free media and open platforms is valuable. Can you imagine what people could do if they were empowered instead of obstructed?
I'm old enough to remember a time before DRM. My point wasn't that it's not valuable to fight for consumer rights, but that some software will inevitably be lost in spite of efforts to preserve it.
It's not an erosion of consumer rights, so much as it's accepting that time comes for us all; hell, I have countless games I'm never going to revisit, and neither is anyone else. Does it truly matter that I own them, if I know I'm not going to play them again?
To be clear, I'm not proposing this model for everything in life, but where games are concerned, I think there's a lot of collectors and archivers who think they speak for people like me, and I'm really just along for the ride.
With the means that we have, that anywhere in the world a dozen people can figure out how to get very niche things adapted in one way or another into different systems, and countless people can keep media on thumb drives rather than needing entire climate controlled libraries, something has to be very, very, extremely obscure for it to be completely lost, and even then there are people for which the obscurity of something is the very thing that makes it appealing.
I don't think you are technically incorrect to some extent that some things will inevitably disappear, but I would still scratch it far more to imposed legal and technical restrictions than to the futility of fighting time.
Say, every single online or mobile game that closes and is completely lost? It's 100% on the erosion of customer rights, exclusively. We have today the technology to keep them running and people willing to do it. It's just that business and contracts defined that, no matter how much people have spend on them, they don't get access to essential server files necessary to keep it running. This is not "time coming for us all", it's selfish businesses enabled by a law with no regards for cultural preservation.
Meanwhile the MAME project year after year figures out how to run incredibly niche arcade titles from decades ago. Even with all the challenges and obstructions.
Really, take a moment to really admire, that with all the struggles and limitations that we have, you as an individual human being, can with a handheld device, access and personally store thousands of Public Domain books from the Gutemberg Project, the entirety of Wikipedia, several full collections of every single game released for multiple consoles, including prototypes, hacks and homebrew. A single person can do that much. Ozymandias' statue may crumble to dust but his history lives on, in someone's pocket.
Maybe to you all that effort is pointless. Maybe it's be easier to just let it go. But there's a whole world of other people who might be interested in it. Maybe you just care about one single game. But a different person cares about a different single game. In a world of billions, how many different things might people care about?
If you talk to me about the inexorable advance of time, I'll still be on the side of the indomitable human spirit.
I think there's world enough for us all. And that is the indomitable human spirit I can get behind!