In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.

The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.

You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.

Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.

Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.

Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.

Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.

Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58

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walrus01 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.

	▲	inigyou 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Do we know any of the technical details of that? Is the SPC just instanced multiplayer with all game logic on the server, or is it just getting some encryption key?

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conception 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.

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josephg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.

I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.

If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.

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throwatdem12311 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?

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saghm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.

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dd8601fn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And, in my mind, there’s a real difference between providing a hosted service and layering on DRM.

Though it would be nice if more game makers ultimately provided a server. That used to be more common.

	▲	throwatdem12311 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is why Stop Killing Games exists.