87% of the games that appeared in the past can no longer be played
A joint study by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network, an organization that promotes software preservation, found that nearly 90% of games released in the United States are no longer available through legal means. It turns out that there is Classic books and movies are archived and widely open to the public, but there is concern that the game culture and history will disappear because the preservation and sharing of games are hindered by laws and regulations and opposition from industry groups. It has been.
87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games | Video Game History Foundation
The Game Availability Study, Explained | Video Game History Foundation
https://gamehistory.org/study-explainer/
There is concern among retro game fans that most classic games are out of print or no longer available, such as the March 2023 launch of Nintendo e Many Game Boy titles became unplayable when the Shop closed.
This time, in order to clarify the current state of accessibility of retro games, the Video Game History Preservation Association randomly selected 1,500 games released before 2010 and investigated the availability of the games. I was. Availability in this context means legal and common means of acquisition, not pirated copies or premium auction items.
Below are the results of that survey. The availability of games released from 1960 to 2009 is represented by five-year bar charts. Availability never exceeded 20% in any five-year period, and was only 13% for the entire period. According to the Video Game History Preservation Society, even American silent movies , that is, movies in the era when movies do not contain sound or music, are preserved at 14%.
Only 13% availability means that 87% of games released in the US cannot be played in the normal way.
Game availability is highly dependent on the console on which the game was released. Therefore, the Video Game History Preservation Society has identified the Commodore 64 as a representative of ``game consoles with low commercial interest and few available games'' as ``a game console with high commercial interest but few games are released anymore''. We selected the Game Boy series from the original Game Boy to the Game Boy Advance as a representative of , and the PlayStation 2 as a representative of 'game consoles where games are actively re-released', and examined the availability of each game.
As a result, we found that only 4.5% of Commodore 64 games, 5.87% of Game Boy series games, and 12% of PlayStation 2 games are available.
Below is a pie chart of the above results. The Game Boy series pie chart (center) also shows that 6.5% of the games released in the Game Boy series became unplayable due to the aforementioned closure of the Nintendo eShop.
These numbers are believed to get worse over time. For example, many of the Commodore 64 games that can be played at the time of writing the article are distributed by Antstream Arcade, a cloud game service specializing in retro games, and if this service is discontinued, the availability of Commodore 64 games will be It goes down to 0.75%.
According to the Video Game Historic Preservation Society, the entertainment software association, a lobbying group for the gaming industry, said, 'The industry is doing enough to commercially preserve its own histories, so protections against preserving agencies are not just games. It will hurt profits, 'he said, and has been opposed to archiving games by libraries. However, the Video Game Historical Preservation Association points out that the survey revealed that commercial efforts alone cannot preserve games.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is scheduled to be revised in 2024, and it is expected that the situation will improve to some extent, but it is also true that many games are already out of print.
From this point of view, the Video Game Historic Preservation Society said, 'Imagine if the only way to see the movie ' Titanic ' was to repair a vintage VCR and insert a second-hand VHS tape. could be digitized, but what if the only way to see it was to visit the Library of Congress?It seems crazy, but is this the reality of the $180 billion gaming industry? It is.'
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in Game, Posted by log1l_ks