bobettes_bob

WHYAREWEALLCAPS , 9 months ago

Super Mario Bros also only sold about 2.5 million units in the first several month after release. Baldur's Gate, for example, sold almost 6 million in 2 weeks. The NES sold 2.5 million units in its first year. The Switch sold 13 million. Even the worst selling modern console, the Xbox Series X sold 8 million in the first year. While individual game prices have not risen, the total number of sales has dramatically increased. So pardon me if I don't think the cost of games not rising has been a problem for publishers and developers of AAA titles. Their real problem has been putting out good content that enough gamers want.

TwilightVulpine , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

This is such important work, but large gaming companies now seem to want games to stop working so people will move to the next thing. That's one of the hidden business interests on tying everything to online services.

I do hope we can still manage to maintain compatibility using emulators, virtual machines and compatibility layers. Digital media is so trivial to copy and store that letting it be lost can only happen due to complete neglect.

guyrocket , 9 months ago

I appreciate that many older games are still available on Steam either "maintained" as in the article or "remastered". Someday soon I will buy Total Annihilation...again...on Steam this time.

But I do not understand why games are seen as disposable, temporary media. Sure the latest titles are flashy but there are plenty of fucking awesome older games that are still fun to play. And as physical media disappears it becomes much more important for the gaming industry to stop pulling the ladder up behind themselves. History matters. Old <> bad.

There should be an equivalent to the classic rock stations for video games. I greatly appreciate the efforts of the MAME, archive.org and Mr. Lee to keep the classics alive.