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Here's why I'm against selling games on retail
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Sly Buccelli



Joined: 10 Jan 2007
Location: DiGiorno of Death

PostPosted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 11:44 am    Post subject: Here's why I'm against selling games on retail    Reply with quote

http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/07/gamestop-getting-involved-with-games-development/
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The King



Joined: 14 Dec 2010
Location: Japan

PostPosted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:03 pm        Reply with quote

It seems like retail game stores might be dying the slow death video rental stores went through.
Everyone buys most of their shit online now right?
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer


Joined: 02 Mar 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:42 pm        Reply with quote

No, because of the huge used games and equipment business. In fact what's happening is that GameStop is gobbling up all the smaller stores and raking in the profits. Their increasing power is what's leading them to the nonsense described in the article. I'd expect an antitrust suit before I'd expect GameStop to go belly up.
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Talbain



Joined: 14 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:42 pm        Reply with quote

The King wrote:
It seems like retail game stores might be dying the slow death video rental stores went through.
Everyone buys most of their shit online now right?

Gamestop has a huge online presence and maintains a large amount of digital and physical exclusives. The exclusive part is slowly becoming less true, which is probably why they're trying to dig their claws in deeper into games.

The other reason they still exist is because they "re-sell" games on day one for five dollars cheaper, which is 100% profit for them, even though it's a huge loss for the developer. Their trade-in policies are what really allow them to exist as a brick-and-mortar outfit though.
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Broco



Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Headquarters

PostPosted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:59 pm        Reply with quote

CubaLibre wrote:
No, because of the huge used games and equipment business. In fact what's happening is that GameStop is gobbling up all the smaller stores and raking in the profits. Their increasing power is what's leading them to the nonsense described in the article. I'd expect an antitrust suit before I'd expect GameStop to go belly up.


Remember when Blockbuster and Borders were gobbling up all the smaller stores?

I give Gamestop another 5 years.
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BenoitRen
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Joined: 05 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 11:14 pm        Reply with quote

I still buy many games in offline stores, but mostly during sales. Once I have a job, my buying behaviour might change.
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CubaLibre
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Joined: 02 Mar 2007
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:13 am        Reply with quote

Broco wrote:
CubaLibre wrote:
No, because of the huge used games and equipment business. In fact what's happening is that GameStop is gobbling up all the smaller stores and raking in the profits. Their increasing power is what's leading them to the nonsense described in the article. I'd expect an antitrust suit before I'd expect GameStop to go belly up.


Remember when Blockbuster and Borders were gobbling up all the smaller stores?

I give Gamestop another 5 years.

Meh. Borders just was run poorly - Barnes & Noble is still going strong. Blockbuster didn't buy your shit back. The whole point of GameStop is that it's the only place to sell your shit that isn't ebay or some other less reliable, more pain in the ass online solution. I don't see people's desire to do that going away any time soon.
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Broco



Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:31 am        Reply with quote

All digital publishers need to do is adopt Steam's discount model for resale value to drop to nothing. Some of them are reluctant right now. But they'll ultimately do it to kill Gamestop and keep all profits.

Likewise, the only real advantage for consumers to buy physical disks is the resale value. So I expect US consumers to hardly use physical disks in five years.
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tiburon



Joined: 26 Sep 2012

PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:32 am        Reply with quote

I've bought a ton of console games the past week, the only thing stopping me in the past was the terribly long time it takes to go on sale, and lack of hard drive space.

It can definitely be a pain but I'd be interested in seeing how things could go digital
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Talbain



Joined: 14 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:42 am        Reply with quote

As with most "all digital future" thinking, the thing that primarily worries me is weirder concepts of ownership as well as preservation. Given Kickstarter creators have basically already done this via tier-based reward systems, where people who supported Kickstarter get exclusive rewards, the fact that Gamestop is doing it isn't exactly surprising. Maybe worse because it's a faceless conglomerate, but game developers already seem pretty keen on the idea.

We'll see how things turn out I suppose.
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jodeaux



Joined: 13 May 2014
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 2:30 am        Reply with quote

I'm still a fan of physical media so I rarely buy any digital copy of a game even though it makes more sense. I guess i like coming home and seeing my copy of god hand on my book shelf.
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Iacus



Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: Stockholm

PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 7:26 am        Reply with quote

Product ships with game-breaking bugs. Patch fixes available exclusively to Gamestop buyers.

The Kickstarter tiers thing is different. When the rewards are well though out, they are just offering a compensation for your help funding the project. They are not holding up any content from the product for those who don't buy from X shop, or producing some extra, isolated content from the rest of the piece that's only available to some.
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Gironika



Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 3:32 pm        Reply with quote

remember when you could play games without being forced to dl the newest "patch" that needs to be installed and restarts your console at least four times?







That's why I like(d) physical media. Plug in, play.
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notbov



Joined: 14 Feb 2009

PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 6:10 pm        Reply with quote

along those lines, I appreciate that the PS4 and Xbone patch games while they/you sleep and everything is nice and ready when you want to play game

the PS4 doesn't patch firmware automatically though, but I'm okay with that since every so often, Sony flips the "brick consoles" switch
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Broco



Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 6:31 pm        Reply with quote

Gironika wrote:
remember when you could play games without being forced to dl the newest "patch" that needs to be installed and restarts your console at least four times?

That's why I like(d) physical media. Plug in, play.


I agree this is seriously annoying on the PS3. But, it's somewhat independent of whether the game was bought digitally or on disc to begin with. It still won't let you play disc-based multiplayer games without downloading all patches.

I'm hopeful they will partially learn their lesson over time and make patches less disruptive and frequent. In some cases, it's technically possible to structure software so that different versions can communicate with each other (particularly when the change is minor), so patches could be less frequently mandatory than they are now. The installation process could also be made a lot less disruptive.
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Talbain



Joined: 14 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 7:02 pm        Reply with quote

Well, most older games also didn't have online multiplayer, so.

Iacus wrote:
The Kickstarter tiers thing is different. When the rewards are well though out, they are just offering a compensation for your help funding the project. They are not holding up any content from the product for those who don't buy from X shop, or producing some extra, isolated content from the rest of the piece that's only available to some.

Kickstarters continue to seem weirdly slipshod on being well thought out, particularly that we now have Kickstarters to finish Kickstarter projects.
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schroeder



Joined: 06 Mar 2013
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 7:56 pm        Reply with quote

Talbain wrote:
Well, most older games also didn't have online multiplayer, so.

And we liked it that way, by god, because we could play right next to our friends after walking eight miles uphill in the snow after school each day.
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firenze



Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Bonus Round

PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 10:37 pm        Reply with quote

Broco wrote:
Likewise, the only real advantage for consumers to buy physical disks is the resale value. So I expect US consumers to hardly use physical disks in five years.


Are you kidding me? There are plenty of other "real advantages". I almost never sell my games, but I always prefer physical when possible.

1) Physical games don't take a long time to download what can now be dozens of GB of data for a single PS4/XBO game.

2) Physical games don't take up nearly as much of your storage space. This is a huge deal for me on Vita in particular with its expensive proprietary storage media, I always go physical when the game has a physical release with this as my #1 reason.

3) Network issues (PSN going down for a data breach?), games disappearing from servers, DRM issues, unclear prospects for digital preservation (I can still play my decade and a half old Saturn discs just fine). All issues with digital, not with physical.

4) That "collector" mentality of having a physical object has some appeal.

I'll buy digital if it's the only option. It's also very nice (and pro-comsumer) that if you miss a game and it becomes rare in physical form, downloading is still easy and affordable.

Broco wrote:
I agree this is seriously annoying on the PS3. But, it's somewhat independent of whether the game was bought digitally or on disc to begin with. It still won't let you play disc-based multiplayer games without downloading all patches.


That's only if you care about the patches or multiplayer. I haven't had my J-360 (STG machine) online in like two years.

CubaLibre wrote:
Meh. Borders just was run poorly - Barnes & Noble is still going strong. Blockbuster didn't buy your shit back. The whole point of GameStop is that it's the only place to sell your shit that isn't ebay or some other less reliable, more pain in the ass online solution. I don't see people's desire to do that going away any time soon.


Gamestop can also reinvent itself as a more online-focused retailer of both physical and digital products. There's this tiny little company called Amazon that still seems to be doing OK without retail storefronts...

There's room in online resale for a company that specializes in games.
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The King



Joined: 14 Dec 2010
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 11:12 pm        Reply with quote

For me physical releases got a lot less appealing even before digital showed up.
Plastic shell cartridges were their own feelie; Optical disc in a case... not so much.
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Broco



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 12:30 am        Reply with quote

firenze wrote:
Broco wrote:
Likewise, the only real advantage for consumers to buy physical disks is the resale value. So I expect US consumers to hardly use physical disks in five years.


Are you kidding me? There are plenty of other "real advantages".


Your points 1 and 2 are real but they're also bound to decline in importance over time as bandwidth improves, disk space gets cheaper and devs start optimizing a bit more for disk space now that they don't assume blu-ray distribution. Points 3 and 4 I would describe as wariness and nostalgia that will decline as consumers get more used to digital, and they apply just as much to books and movies as to games.

Broco wrote:
Gamestop can also reinvent itself as a more online-focused retailer of both physical and digital products. There's this tiny little company called Amazon that still seems to be doing OK without retail storefronts...


The track record of retailers reinventing themselves as online companies is very poor. Their business experience just doesn't carry over and their get their lunch eaten by digital-first companies instead. Notice how you mentioned Amazon and not Walmart there.
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Talbain



Joined: 14 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 3:39 am        Reply with quote

Broco wrote:
Your points 1 and 2 are real but they're also bound to decline in importance over time as bandwidth improves, disk space gets cheaper and devs start optimizing a bit more for disk space now that they don't assume blu-ray distribution. Points 3 and 4 I would describe as wariness and nostalgia that will decline as consumers get more used to digital, and they apply just as much to books and movies as to games.

Assuming the FCC doesn't end net neutrality; I would generally agree with this, but more and more it seems like bandwidth is becoming a premium service. Disk space has definitely gotten a lot cheaper, but the ease of maintaining it is a bit more difficult than putting a HDD on a shelf.
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BenoitRen
I bought RAM


Joined: 05 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 8:45 am        Reply with quote

These "it'll get better" and "they'll get used to it" arguments have been in use for years now.

Bandwidth already has improved in recent years, but it doesn't seem to translate to console game downloads. Part of the problem is probably that the storage medium can only save data so fast.

Hard drives get bigger, but they also tend to break faster these days. You're just preparing for a single point of failure, as having more than one hard drive isn't exactly practical.

Storage space won't get much cheaper on the PS Vita. Just look at the track record of the Memory Stick.
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Iacus



Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 8:57 am        Reply with quote

Quote:
Your points 1 and 2 are real but they're also bound to decline in importance over time as bandwidth improves, disk space gets cheaper and devs start optimizing a bit more for disk space now that they don't assume blu-ray distribution. Points 3 and 4 I would describe as wariness and nostalgia that will decline as consumers get more used to digital, and they apply just as much to books and movies as to games.

Agreed.

With broadband internet nowadays I can purchase even a modern, big, digital game and be playing it in less time than it takes me to go to a physical store and back with a disk.
The expensive proprietary format is a problem of the Vita in particular. The price-per-GB of hard drives is getting better and better.
Digital preservation is uncertain and a bit worrying, but much less than people imagine. And digital storefronts have been fairly good so far about DRM/legal issues (I can still download and install my now-impossible-to-purchase copy of Outrun 2006 as many times as I want from Steam)
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BenoitRen
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 12:12 pm        Reply with quote

Iacus wrote:
With broadband internet nowadays I can purchase even a modern, big, digital game and be playing it in less time than it takes me to go to a physical store and back with a disk.

Until you delete it and want to play it again later. Then the physical disc has an advantage.
Quote:
The price-per-GB of hard drives is getting better and better.

At least until the next flood in Thailand.
Quote:
And digital storefronts have been fairly good so far about DRM/legal issues

Except Nintendo, of course.
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The King



Joined: 14 Dec 2010
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 2:02 pm        Reply with quote

QUOTE
-Response
QUOTE
-Response
Quote
-Response

We have achieved arguing on the internet.
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Iacus



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 2:46 pm        Reply with quote

Quote:
Until you delete it and want to play it again later. Then the physical disc has an advantage.

I make a point to back up the bigger games to a hard drive after I install them/before I delete them, so still better then optical media.

Quote:
At least until the next flood in Thailand.

Or a flood at my house. I bet that would drop my concern for the digital preservation of interactive media several notches down the list

Quote:
Except Nintendo, of course.

Of course. I don't deal with Nintendo so it doesn't bother me currently. Even with them you can take precautions though, I guess. Plus, they can't remain a dinosaur forever.
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Talbain



Joined: 14 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 5:22 pm        Reply with quote

Iacus wrote:
Digital preservation is uncertain and a bit worrying, but much less than people imagine.

What is this based on? From all accounts I've had talking with people in academia and developers themselves, this is a big, pretty much unresolved, issue.
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Iacus



Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 7:15 pm        Reply with quote

Talbain wrote:
Iacus wrote:
Digital preservation is uncertain and a bit worrying, but much less than people imagine.

What is this based on? From all accounts I've had talking with people in academia and developers themselves, this is a big, pretty much unresolved, issue.

Ok, there are several angles here.

If you mean games with online components, digital-only goodies, microtransactions etc, then yes. If the offline service dies they are pretty much irrecoverable unless the developer releases the data/assets/server code.

As for more traditional self-contained games in digital form, Steam lets you back up the data and have claimed they will free everyone's libraries if the service were to cease (you can choose not to believe this, as the logistical realities make it kind of unlikely, but if you have the data backed up, it could eventually be extracted)

For digital only console games, the piracy scene is already "archiving" most if not all the releases, so there's at least that. The official position of Sony, MS etc is uncertain in case of abandonware but even if they don't care and just plain delete the files from their servers, there's still the pirate archive floating in the bittorrent.
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Gironika



Joined: 05 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 8:18 pm        Reply with quote

Talbain wrote:
Iacus wrote:
Digital preservation is uncertain and a bit worrying, but much less than people imagine.

What is this based on? From all accounts I've had talking with people in academia and developers themselves, this is a big, pretty much unresolved, issue.

Try to prove that you can compile software 10, 15 years down the road - e.g. can you compile a fully working Windows 98 binary right now? Even more horrible when it's SIL-software we're talking about …



Iacus wrote:
With broadband internet nowadays I can purchase even a modern, big, digital game and be playing it in less time than it takes me to go to a physical store and back with a disk.

If you have to pay extra for getting more than just 100, 50, 25… gb traffic/month, you'll think twice about this. And then you haven't watched any HD series or movies yet, right?
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Iacus



Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 8:30 pm        Reply with quote

I know very well that that is with the proviso that you have access to fast, unrestricted internet, which is sadly not a reality yet for a lot of people.
I used to have 1 mbit internet for many years, and it was maddening. I think it took me four days to install GTA IV. In those cases of course physical media is better. That's why all current gen systems still have physical disc drives in addition to hdds and internet capability.

I anticipate that the internet situation will get better in 5-10 years with improvements in the infrastructure and market forces driving more reasonable pricing plans. Hell, when true 4G wireless becomes commonplace, we could potentially be streaming the games over the air to our devices.

As for proprietary software, well. That's proprietary and owned by whoever. Most games are, but of course it will always be much easier to preserve a working binary than the full toolchain, configurations and hardware required to produce that binary.
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BenoitRen
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 10:07 pm        Reply with quote

Iacus wrote:
Or a flood at my house. I bet that would drop my concern for the digital preservation of interactive media several notches down the list

*facepalm*
Gironika wrote:
Try to prove that you can compile software 10, 15 years down the road - e.g. can you compile a fully working Windows 98 binary right now?

Bad example, because the source code isn't available. If it was, it probably wouldn't be a problem. You can still easily get tools to compile Windows 9x executables, for one.
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Talbain



Joined: 14 Jan 2007

PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 10:18 pm        Reply with quote

Iacus wrote:
If you mean games with online components, digital-only goodies, microtransactions etc, then yes. If the offline service dies they are pretty much irrecoverable unless the developer releases the data/assets/server code.

As for more traditional self-contained games in digital form, Steam lets you back up the data and have claimed they will free everyone's libraries if the service were to cease (you can choose not to believe this, as the logistical realities make it kind of unlikely, but if you have the data backed up, it could eventually be extracted)

For digital only console games, the piracy scene is already "archiving" most if not all the releases, so there's at least that. The official position of Sony, MS etc is uncertain in case of abandonware but even if they don't care and just plain delete the files from their servers, there's still the pirate archive floating in the bittorrent.

This seems like a lot of caveats, not to mention that I don't really have a lot of faith in Steam as a long-term solution to the issue. Their purpose isn't preservation in the first place. Good Old Games has a better set of practices, but that has recently become hazier as they are slowly beginning to accept some forms of DRM.

The piracy scene is exceptionally spotty and tends to exist mostly for mainstream games. Yes, Assassin's Creed will be around forever, but the more vague/less popular a game becomes, the less likely it is to actually be backed up anywhere. This is even more true after Megaupload was taken down. Petabytes of data gone in very short order. The measures you're presenting don't hold up to long-term scrutiny unless you're talking about a small subsection of games; that subsection frequently being actively preserved by the companies who make the games (because companies like Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo have the billions of dollars to do that--worth noting that they only really started doing this within the last ten years however--even for these large companies, content from before the mid-2000s is quite rare). There's a large secondary market for ASM hackers now due to many of these larger companies not having the source code to games they want to republish, as little as five years on. THQ lost almost 60% of all their assets during that company's quick departure. Your arguments are stopgaps that aren't reliable and tend towards popular content. If you're making an argument that popular content is what deserves to be preserved, I can understand a bit better, otherwise it seems to rely on a lot of uncertainty.
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Broco



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 10:29 pm        Reply with quote

I don't see why you would say piracy has spotty preservation coverage. I don't know of a single game from the 80s and 90s that failed to be preserved and redistributed via piracy. Even unreleased games like Star Fox 2 sometimes make it out. A single preserved copy can be endlessly and cheaply duplicated once put online and will always exist on somebody's disk regardless of megaupload-style shutdown events.
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Talbain



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 10:52 pm        Reply with quote

Broco wrote:
I don't see why you would say piracy has spotty preservation coverage. I don't know of a single game from the 80s and 90s that failed to be preserved and redistributed via piracy. Even unreleased games like Star Fox 2 sometimes make it out. A single preserved copy can be endlessly and cheaply duplicated once put online and will always exist on somebody's disk regardless of megaupload-style shutdown events.

I know of quite a few, but most of them weren't released to the US or Japan. That said, there are more fundamental problems with these, largely the reliability of the data. Even if they do exist, you may have to go to four or more different sites to actually find a copy, and even those copies may have issues with data parity of a known "good dump" list. I say spotty when I talk about reliability, not about the data existing somewhere.
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Broco



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 11:08 pm        Reply with quote

Well, easy availability is nice but it's not what the word "preservation" means. A couple of decades ago it was more inconvenient to obtain even highly popular content (you had to drive to a library, possibly in another city) than it is today to check out 3-4 pirate sites for some incredibly obscure title of your interest. The fact that you're redefining the term just goes to show that preservation is a 99% solved problem.
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BenoitRen
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 11:21 pm        Reply with quote

There is no good dump of Custom Mate 3 around, for one (dumps exist, but not as good as disc images).

Only recently have clean dumps of Dreamcast games started to appear (because pirates would shred them to fit them on a CD-R).
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Talbain



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PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2014 11:23 pm        Reply with quote

Broco wrote:
Well, easy availability is nice but it's not what the word "preservation" means. A couple of decades ago it was more inconvenient to obtain even highly popular content (you had to drive to a library, possibly in another city) than it is today to check out 3-4 pirate sites for some incredibly obscure title of your interest. The fact that you're redefining the term just goes to show that preservation is a 99% solved problem.

Convenience also isn't what preservation means, and this is why your definition is at least as troubling. Reliability is what I'm talking about, easy availability is not the same thing. I'm also fairly certain that reliability is a big part of preservation? At least for historical purposes.

You can also look at MAME to get a pretty good idea of just how many games have no known good dumps.
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CubaLibre
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 12:32 am        Reply with quote

Talbain wrote:
You can also look at MAME to get a pretty good idea of just how many games have no known good dumps.

Well ok, but was the preservation situation improved before the internet age? Where are the climate-controlled university library warehouses full of original arcade boards? The question isn't whether preservation is "solved" by widespread digital copying, but whether it's better than the alternative, which is exclusive reliance on physical media.
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Talbain



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PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 12:57 am        Reply with quote

CubaLibre wrote:
Talbain wrote:
You can also look at MAME to get a pretty good idea of just how many games have no known good dumps.

Well ok, but was the preservation situation improved before the internet age? Where are the climate-controlled university library warehouses full of original arcade boards? The question isn't whether preservation is "solved" by widespread digital copying, but whether it's better than the alternative, which is exclusive reliance on physical media.

Yes, the situation has definitely improved, but it has improved in ways that many people wouldn't expect. As an example, ever since the Resident Evil 1.5 game has come out, rather than focusing on preserving the data that is there, most of the work that has gone into it has been an attempt to make a playable game out of that data. Certainly, there is an arm that spends a great deal of time working with the integrity of the data, but the larger focus continues to be the development of the data as a playable project. The same is true, ultimately, of Star Fox 2.

I do not intend to argue that preservation has not gotten better since the internet age. It has gotten much, much better. At the same time though, I don't like the implication that this is a (mostly) solved problem. It dismisses a lot of stuff out of hand. Yes, it has gotten better, but there's still a lot of work to be done.
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SuperWes



Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: St. Louis, Missouri

PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 1:27 am        Reply with quote

I still don't understand what's wrong with GameStop giving game developers money.

-Wes
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MattCD42



Joined: 13 Sep 2011
Location: Under the rock

PostPosted: Fri Jul 18, 2014 3:44 am        Reply with quote

SuperWes wrote:
I still don't understand what's wrong with GameStop giving game developers money.


Mass Effect 4 now exclusive to Gamestop, power to the players... that shop at GameStop.

I am so glad I have an independent game store nearby.
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