LogFAQs > #913798852

DPsx7 posted...

Speculation my ass, games have disappeared already. A short list was provided. Just because PT didn't cost anything doesn't mean the same won't happen for paid content. Companies never have our best interests in mind.

And like I said, all those games are still available, people downloaded them and they can still be played to this day. Once they stopped being sold they didn't magically disappear off of someone's hard drive. Hell, if you want to get really technical the games still exist on their respective marketplaces as well, it is just that they are not accessible due to licensing issues. Same thing happens when any digital game is "removed' from a market place, "de-listed" is a more accurate term.

Sure, if you stretch the time frame long enough. I think 100 years is more than sufficient for our purposes and longer than any company will be selling games. Digital is the worst possible choice for content because it's not trivial to simply transfer it like you think.

Given that there are books over 2500 years old that we still want to read today (Sun Tsu's The Art of War for example) I would say that preservation is very important. There are plenty of examples of media such as movies and books that were only stored physically that have now been completely lost to time because their physical media was destroyed. Hell, one of the first video games (Tennis for Two) suffered this fate and now all that exists are recreations of it. Digital is a very important medium for long term preservation and we should embrace it else we erase our history not just in video games, but in all forms of media.

As for triviality, it is all files, they can be copied pretty easily. Cracking them is different, but look at all the games that get their DRM cracked in a matter of days after release. Not that out of the realm of possibility that given enough time you can crack any digital media.
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I am a senior software engineer. If you see me post here, I am tired of writing TPS reports.