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[Razor2]

Its realy a nice idea...but there are some major problems with it:

1. Gaming companies have merged (bought out) to huge entertainment mammoths, which have little to no interest other than making money, and won't even respond to such a petition.

2. Even if the respond, they will never rerelease their old stuff, because of 2 things: 1. the average user which makes the 99% of the gamers out, would see old games as garbage and thing that the company makes such games. 2. There would be 100s of technical problems with the old games, which would lead to a disaster for the companies. (some dumb fellow could even sue the company that the game he purchased won't run on his brand new system)

3. It is the sad truth the we the "old school" gamers, who like old games are minority for the industry, and as a minority our demands are not priorities for them.

I think there could only be 2 ways for this problem: Either the companies offer them for free to download thereby freeing themself from any liability or sell the rights to some other company who releases them. Unfortunately the 2. option is highly unlikly in the days of handheld games.

[Dino]

As many people, I am sceptic in outcome of this petition. But as said before, it doesn't hurt to try. Therefore I signed it.

[Ghost Pig]

Hi,

I'm from the place that started this particular campaign, and after reading plix's post thought I'd sign up and comment on some of the things they mentioned.

I admit, not contacting people within the Abandonware realm was a grave omission, and something that would have probably brought more support to the article from the word go; it would also have filled out the article, provided more in-depth information and provided an insight into the Abandonware community.

I'll take the plea of short-sightedness, as to why - believe me, there would have been few people as suprised as me when Slashdot actually ran the story; I was also surprised by the amount of other sites that posted about the story. Exiled Gamers is a tiny site in comparison to almost any others of it's age, I expected this to go no further than the forum and a few people outside it, I certainly didn't expect 2307 people to have signed the (worthless?) petition.

I didn't write the article for the traffic to the site, I wrote it because it was something that I firmly believed in; I've been playing games for as long as I can remember, and I thought it a terrible shame that I could no longer obtain titles such as System Shock 2, Syndicate, Speedball 2, etc legally anymore.

[guesst]

Well, as the person who started this thread it's about time I chimed in. Good getting the viewpoint of the person who originated. (Glad you signed up. Hope you hang around.) Now, here's MY viewpoint on it.

The petition is a good thing. I don't entirely agree with how it stated it, but I agree with the motion. However, it's a vastly complicated issue and I don't think this petition addressed it entirely. Let's break it down.

To start with, the only option that everyone will be 100% happy with will be if we are free to have and play whatever games we want for free. Let's be honest with ourselves, that's the option that no one will complain about. The next step towards a middle ground would then be any game who's company is still in business offer their game for download at a modest price, the more modest the better. They don't need to update or support the games, just so long as they are runable in some form or another. The next step would be something like having companies offer their games in some physical medium at pretty much retail prices. Epic MegaGames pretty much does this still. It's successful in preventing whiners from claiming their games are abandoned, but I don't know was sort of revenue this brings in. The last step would be that every game ever offered or sold still be on the shelves, fully supported, at full retail. Blizzard does this with certain titles, but that's because their games just plain rock.

Now let's turn things around. The reason why game companies don't do any of these options is because it takes time and money to implement any distribution paradigm. So asking them to just give their games away, games that represent significant investments of money, even if that investment was years ago, is just no acceptable. And the "modest fee" idea is hard for them to swallow. You want them to take a game which probably didn't make it's money back the first time around, throw more money at it, and have it almost guaranteed not make it's money back the second time around. It's not reasonable. And as for offering them on the shelves, the software retail industry is a mess. Trust me on this one, ain't gonna happen. In the end the easiest and most cost effective thing is for them to sit on their licensees and deny anyone the right to do anything with them.

So we're at an impasse. We want the games, they don't want to give them to us. So what do we do?

In my opinion, the best solution would be an extention of something that's already happening. There are a few third party services that license old games for download and play, designed to work on modern systems through their software, at a modest fee. If some new company were to do this for old DOS games or an existing company expand to old DOS games and tell companies all they needed to do was give their okay and they'll get a nickel every time someone plays their game, there's the chance that it might work. There'll still be the mooches who run around the seedy alleys of the internet "sharing" their stolen goods, but at least they wouldn't have the excuse of not having any legitimate option. My only complaint with these services is they charge month-by-month for their games. I don't play those games enough to justify month-to-month. Personally I'd rather drop $1 to $5 (depending on how good it is) and be able to play it whenever I want from now till forever, but that model may not be cost effective. Still, this may be the best solution. Get some company that already does downloads of Atari or Genesis or PlayStation 1 games to adopt DOS games, or have some new service emerge that specializes in making this crowd happy do the same thing.

Personally, I have great hope for these sort of monthly services. If they gain popularity, merge, and especally migrate to perhaps X-Box or the revolution so that old games could be played from people's couches, it could be the start of a brave new world, only without all the scary drug references. It would be like cable for games. But making this happen is not the thing of petitions. First of all, existing services need to find support and their CEOs need to be written (by paying customers even better) and be told that it would be a good idea for them to take steps as outlined above. If the money people think it's a good idea it happens.

Man, that's alot of writing. Kudos to anyone with the stamana to read it all.

[Ioncannon]

I signed...

[wormpaul]

:angel: I signed the petition...maybe it helps...maybe not

[_r.u.s.s.]

yep, me 2. i also gave the petition to all of my friends to sign

[Bobbin Threadbare]

Where do you sign?

[Ghost Pig]

Sign here

I think that Game Tap could be the third party company you're after; they already do a large amount of titles from a selection of systems and often acquire 'new' titles, the only problem being that it's a monthly subscription, and at no point do you actually get to 'own' the game.

So, maybe it would have been best to write to the people of GameTap and say "Is there any possibility of you ever getting game x on your site?" and then seeing if they're open to suggestion regarding the games they add, as you say though these kinds of requests are much better coming from paying customers.

Thanks for the feedback on the entire petition, it's been a rather interesting education.

[guesst]

Originally posted by Ghost Pig@May 3 2006, 12:14 PM
Sign here

I think that Game Tap could be the third party company you're after; they already do a large amount of titles from a selection of systems and often acquire 'new' titles, the only problem being that it's a monthly subscription, and at no point do you actually get to 'own' the game.

So, maybe it would have been best to write to the people of GameTap and say "Is there any possibility of you ever getting game x on your site?" and then seeing if they're open to suggestion regarding the games they add, as you say though these kinds of requests are much better coming from paying customers.

Thanks for the feedback on the entire petition, it's been a rather interesting education.

Gametap's not the only one although it is perhaps the most successfull so far. But a search for "Games on Demand," which is what this sort of thing calls itself, will find the others like it. Generally I avoid linking to commercial sites that I feel should already be public knowledge to avoid looking like I'm employing the sort of subersive advertising techniques that pervade the modern internet forum.

Did I just contridict myself?

At any rate. It's true that with Games on Demand services (Hmm, the abreviation of that would be G.O.D.S. Maybe I'll just type it out) you don't OWN the game, per se. But then again, you don't legally OWN it when you download it here. However, with Games on Demand services you are allowed to play it any time you want. Isn't that what you want in the first place? To play the game? Sure you don't have a cracked copy sitting in your hard drive, but that's what comprimise is about. This is about meeting on a middle ground here. We get what we want, mostly, and don't break the law to do it.