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Originally posted by Japofran@May 10 2006, 07:10 PM
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[...] they work in a company that defends other companies for erasing the gaming past basically and how any gamer can defend this is beyond me. It's funny to see that a lot of the games that are protected by ESA are now owned by companies that bought out the original publishers - no wonder there's no lack of respect from those publishers for those games.
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That's simply not so. If a game's copyright is not owned by the people who created it that's because they sold it. Nobody forced them, they could have published it themselves. And the company that bought the copyright from the original authors can sell it in turn, and so on as many times as you wish. If all transactions are voluntary, how can you say that somebody's not "respected"?
Yes playing games which costed money and effort to create for free is swell, but the thing that suits YOU best is not always the right thing.
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You don't seem to understand how things work clearly. The developer usually does NOT own the right to the games - take Bullfrog, whose gaming licenses like Theme Park and Syndicate were owned by Electronic Arts.
There's been quite a few games that died because of bancrupsy or being bought out. Fallout anyone? System Shock? And those are only more recent examples. Games older than 10+ years are even a worse nightmare.
Basically, the games were often never the property of the developers and when the publishers went bust or got bought out (Psygnosis, Cryo, US Gold, etc. take a pick) the gaming licenses often get burried.
I recall an interview with one of the developers of Bethesda who said they were in an unique position to release their old hits for free since they own the rights to any game they made unlike most other developers. Hell, even the publishers sometimes no longer own the code of the games they own the rights to because they don't have any interest in it anymore. Is that no disrespect? It seems so to me.
When publishers like EA buy up all the smaller publishers, it's no wonder so many classics go lost and burried in EA's big gaming license books.