In a recent move against the archiving of video game history, publishers have finally come clean on why they dislike retro games so much.
The recent legal case regarding the archiving of video games, which was helpfully collated at Games Radar, is finally over. Unfortunately, the final ruling is firmly against making gaming history available to all.
This is an obviously awful and sad move culturally, but it will also affect people who will want to make games in the future.
After all, imagine not being able to go to a library and read the works of Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, or any other historical author. Without ready access to the history of literature, what could anyone hope for its future?
Likewise with games. We all need access to the formative titles that have shaped the medium. They are the “required reading” before you even step into the world of actually making games.
However, the motivation behind this protectionism is profoundly disappointing. Again, it comes from the festering den of iniquity: games publishing.
What with all the layoffs across the games industry to compensate for rampant budgetary overspending in publishing, the reality behind keeping retro games within a paid walled garden is about charging new money for old rope and controlling the market to force gamers to play new games.
The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases, which is uniquely stupid.
We’ve had over a decade to prove that AAA games are not viable in a business sense. The budgets and returns are not sustainable. However, to get these massive budgets off the ground, the industry effectively eliminated mid-tier games.
These mid-tier games are what kept the medium alive and allowed it to flourish, simply because there was a greater amount of functional variety to cater to people’s disparate tastes.
Retro games are also part of this cultural ecosystem, and they are now off-limits and gatekept by clearly inept and greedy publishers.
Today is a sad day for gaming, but in some sense, the openly brazen attitude of publishers is definitely something the gaming community won’t forget in a hurry.
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