This has been on my mind for some time now.I(nearly 18 years old) still caught the dos games times.But as the years go by, will abandonware survive?Because cases of games being released as abw are getting more more something of a dream.True the Dos games will always be abw, but the people that didn't catch the DOS games virus, will they look back? Will they stop from playing warcraft 5 and half life 4, just to play doom2 and dune2? Following my train of thought, i ask you, is the abandoware scene slowly but surely dying?
Even if companies would release their games as abw, would the number of games released as abw amount to the games that are released on the market? Even so, will people look back to the good old days.In a society advancing further and further, will people stop and look at the golden games that lead to HL, or NFS?

Abandonware won't die but it will change.
Games we now perceive as 'slightly aged' like games from 1999 and such will become the abandonware of the future (well you can already find games from 1999 in the old-games heap in shops, but in the future these games will be reffered to as abandonware)
The thing is that a lot of games will become an in-house production since EA is steadily taking over the market. Soon most games will be made and published by EA.
Thus the chance of a game being truly abandoned will become much smaller.

I think rather than people looking back at the original unreal people will look back at games like Unreal Tournament 2004 and such.

But abandonware (better said "old games" in this case) will not die as long as time continues to progress.

Time will tell. We will be around to see.

I really hope :sneaky:

I still fire up the old emulators once in a while (Fathom on Atari 2600 -- nothing like it :D). I think newer stuff is more popular than older stuff, but once in a while it's still fun to go back to that one game that still sticks in your mind after more than a decade.

I think Stroggy got it right. In ten years games will take up 60 GB of space use graphics similar to animated movies such as The Incredibles, and games such as Vice City, UT2004/2003, and other's will be seen by the genral public as crap and a waste of time.

Ofcoarse the question of what will happen with the games we now regard as abandonware... thats different.
I believe we will still play it, but I don't think it will garner much intrest from the younger gamers, in other words the games now known as abandonware will be played purely for the sake of nostalgia. Perhaps more and more companies will do like Bethesda (and others) and put their really old games up for download free of charge.

But its like Tom said, we'll just have to wait and see.

Well eventually all these games will cease to exist and be forgotten. But hopefully that isn't for a very long time.

Don't forget that time goes on. And you better keep step with it. But anything always returns to it's roots. :sneaky:

Well, as long as there is someone outside that keeps track of them and doesn't forget the "good old times" there's still hope.