Feeling abandoned
Abandonware is one of gaming’s great elephants in the room. Most long-time gamers know about it, know where to get it, and understand the debate going on over the dubious legal status of downloading games that are considered “abandonware”. Sadly, videogame anti-piracy efforts often end up removing access to classic games that have no other distribution channels. The situation essentially becomes a matter of people having to break the law in order to play older games that they once enjoyed but can no longer find. You’re only other option is eBay which is not an official channel and also carries its own problems that are too lengthy for me to list here.
The definition of what is “abandonware” exactly depends on who you ask, though for our purposes let’s just assume it is a game that has been off the market for at least a couple of years and cannot be found for purchase in the usual manner, either on or off-line. People who download abandonware do it because they can’t find the games in any other manner. In many cases the games in question belonged to a company who has gone out of business and the legal status of their intellectual properties are difficult to determine. Unfortunately, many companies who do have rights to older games have moved to block their distribution in this manner, without offering any alternative. This has not become a matter of “We don’t want you to download our games for free and would rather get paid for it.” but rather a matter of “We don’t want you to download our games.”
This is utterly ridiculous in this day and age. With broadband internet access on the rise there is an untapped market for older games. By charging a reasonable amount, say $5 a game, and allowing customers to download it you could create another revenue stream. The best part would be that the only real cost is bandwidth and diskspace, which would easily be covered by a minimal number of downloads. Considering some older games were less than 10 megabytes in size, the amount of bandwidth and diskspace consumed would likely be covered by a single download. This would not be a huge moneymaker for any company, but it does offer players a way to legally access these older games. See, I am perfectly willing to pay for the games that interest me. I suspect that many people who routinely visit abandonware sites are the same way, but they have no alternative.
Yes, I am aware there are some sites out there that offer a service that allow you to play some old games in your browser. That’s a fair compromise but completely different from just being able to download some old games to your harddrive and play them whenever you like. Not to mention most of the games classified as abandonware aren’t going to show up on such services anytime soon.
I’m not going to advocate piracy, even in this instance. I long ago gave up my abandonware obsession but I still feel for the fans who want to play these old games but can only gain access through means that, at best, exist in a legal gray area. There is an opportunity here for publishers and the IP holders to make a little extra cash and gain a lot of goodwill. Sadly, I don’t think anyone really sees the marketing potential of a game that is still highly talked of but is over a decade old.
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June 27th, 2006 at 11:33 am
I must admit that I feel the urge, every once in a while, to find a older game that I remember fondly. I have done so. In fact, there have been one or two that took me a while to track down simply because I had forgotten the name, or the developer, or some such. Good games, but a little lost in time.
The other thing that Abandonware communities provide is a resource for information on a lot of old games. They are not merely a source, but also a catalogue and encyclopaedia of lost game knowledge. Kept together by a love of the underdog game, these obsessives strive to keep alive some great forgotten games (and some that should be forgotten).
I wish that it were possible to change copyright law for computer software. Make the license last for only, say, 5-10 years before expiring into the public domain, or at least a distributable domain. Then set up a foundation to collect, manage and distribute past-licence games. Some companies have thrown open their older games (Revolution Software, for instance). I certainly would (and will, should the future hold it) release my games, and possibly my code, after a 5-10 year period. It just makes more sense in the digital age to make things free, so we don’t lose them.
June 27th, 2006 at 11:42 am
It would be nice if companies would release their games under public domain prior to going out of business. If they couldn’t sell their IP, at least make it legal to download it so it’s not lost for all time.
June 27th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
I have no problems with downloading a game for free if there’s no current way to legally pay for a new copy. Likewise, if I -can- pay for a copy, I do. (I probably spend several thousand dollars on games and game-related purchases a year, so…) Of course, a lot of stuff I download for free is stuff that I have previously paid for, but lost the CD for in various moving houses, so it’s all a little complex… I respect companies like Square-Enix, Capcom and Blizzard regularly re-releasing their very old games for new systems, and so I don’t download their stuff. But on the other hand, I’m completely unaware of any way to legally pay for new copies of the LucasArts back catalogue, so I consider them fair game.
July 5th, 2006 at 4:57 am
One problem with PC abandonware is technical support. Old DOS games and even games from the days of early DirectX and 3d acceleration won’t necessary run on today’s PCs. Once the publishers start asking money for the games, they also have to start worrying about the users not being able to run the games. And at this point the expenses for tech support can easily start to seem bigger than the possible neglible gains.
They might just say “your Windows XP box probably won’t run this game, use DosBox or whatever, we don’t care” (Bethesda has put Elder Scrolls: Arena up for free download and basically says this), but then there’s the risk that the buyers wouldn’t read the disclaimer and would start complaining about the publisher ripping them off. Again, a big risk to take for the sake of possibly neglible gains.
Since it might be too expensive to ask money for the games, and giving the game away for free makes little sense from a business perspective, I don’t have too high hopes for publishers to do much for the abandonware dilemma.
July 5th, 2006 at 7:37 am
Consumers have finite leisure time, and providing very inexpensive older games potentially hurts business for more expensive current games. It also might further encourage consumers to “just wait until it’s cheap/free,” in much the same way that I currently wait for many games to price drop before purchasing, or wait for movies to come out on DVD instead of paying theater prices.
Also, the “this game might disappear forever” incentive spurs sales. I’ve bought limited edition packages, or picked up low-print-run RPGs quickly after seeing the way early Suikoden games or Valkyrie Profile vanished from the market.
So, developers have a financial incentive to make games available for a limited time, then let them disappear from the market and become unavailable.
July 5th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
I often have to resort to downloading old games that I want to re-play. I own the original games, but many of them were released ~10 years ago, and the floppies just don’t work anymore.
July 5th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
One company that does understand all of this is Apogee (now a part of 3d Realms). They still sell some of their games, and for any that they don’t sell, they eventually end up released as freeware (if the source code can be located, it’s also released).
The games are all cheap- and most of them can be downloaded online, or for some of them you can get them on disk.
Please support one of the (few) companies that understands what it’s fans want, and goes out of its way to help them.
July 6th, 2006 at 3:25 am
[…] he marketing potential of a game that is still highly talked of but is over a decade old. Feeling abandoned Originally from Unfettered Blat […]
July 15th, 2006 at 11:04 am
“One problem with PC abandonware is technical support.”
This has been a quote brought to you by no one ohther than me.
you want technical support for abandonware? How fucking retarded is that? It’s like demanding an ancient Egyptian to rise from his tomb to explain you the meaning of hyroglyphs. Dude, if your new pc can’t bear it or the games wont’ run, simply don’t play them.
Anyway, i didn’t read through all of this, my attention span’s rather limited. I won’t even come back here, ever to read the replies to my upsetting post.
We wouldn’t need to play abandonware games, though, if the gaming industry returned to making games and not seizure causers.
August 1st, 2006 at 2:48 am
We are talking about piracy since the 80s. This hurt the market so much, that twenty years later we have huge software houses that can easily afford multimillion-dollars budget for any title they release. Tough life, eh? The most pirated piece of software on earth, Microsoft Windows, produced the richest software company ever. Do you see a pattern here?
(and about the little guys getting screwed: please tell me a “normal” manufacturing market in which the little guys don’t get screwed sooner or later. Truth is, in manufacturing, small players must concentrate on highly-profitable niche markets, where purchasers are more than willing to pay more and understand why they have to do so — see Apple. Did you see any new car manufacturer “breaking” into the market for cheap cars recently?)