Scratched discs can be polished, pretty much restoring them to as-new condition, and the lifetime of Blu-ray media, even recordables, is pretty impressive, as in: longer than yours or mine.

Addressing the core of your question: in my opinion, the value of abandoned games is limited: playing them is usually no fun whatsoever, if only because of the quality-of-life being very-noticeably substandard due to later innovations.

So, a couple of (reproducibly archivable) playthrough recordings may suffice for most purposes. That being said, I do think publishers should be pushed to open-source their games upon reaching end-of-life. But given that a lot of dependencies tend to be licensed, as is some (or even most) artwork, that push should be rather gentle.

The main point of campaigns like "Stop Killing Games" should be addressed through regular consumer protection: if the game you bought becomes unplayable in 2 years or less, there should be a refund. But beyond that, I'm afraid goodwill is the only way forward, not legislation.

And I'm saying this as someone who still has several playable PSP Minidiscs, alas never plays them anymore (except Loco Roco, once a year), because, well, they're no fun anymore

▲

titzer 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The oldest DVD I own is from 1996 and it still works without any problem. Take care of them and don't let them get scratched up. Rip them and make a backup.

▲

IveSeenItAll 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Congratulations on owning one of the very first DVDs! Please take good care of it, but it sounds like you've got that covered!

Meanwhile, the OP article is about games, Sony PlayStation games in particular. These games tend to be recorded on special media, with hardware-specific copy protection steps, requiring special actions for basic preservation (which become impossible with the passage of time), leading to specific issues, hence this article, which tries to influence legislation to prevent these.

▲

conductr 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Games are different. They all have DRM which make it essentially encrypted with no decryption service available. Likewise, the game isn’t usually 100% contained on disc. So it relies on the internet and service layers to actually play the game. These all probably have their own dependencies. So the question in my mind becomes, do game companies have an obligation to support games in perpetuity? I think when phrased that way, the answer is an obvious no.

	▲	khedoros1 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> They all have DRM which make it essentially encrypted with no decryption service available. Not all do. Games for a lot of systems can be read directly from the storage media. > Likewise, the game isn’t usually 100% contained on disc. Only for the couple most-recent generations. But even virtually all of my PS4 games (not to mention earlier generations) are actually on the disc, playable without a download. > So the question in my mind becomes, do game companies have an obligation to support games in perpetuity? I think when phrased that way, the answer is an obvious no. Agreed, but I also think that if they don't have that obligation, then society doesn't have the obligation to provide copyright protection when they drop support.