Commercial Game Preservation

dulsi

I found this GDC talk interesting. It is about preserving closed source games so you can recreate them latter. I find it interesting considering my work to restore old open source games. Their method only works for a static result and has a high cost. I'd prefer to keep a game up to date but I that also has a high cost. Not to mention it doesn't mean you can easily recreate an old version like he describes. He talks about the problems in his methodology in regards to long running games but had no solution at the time.

Elouin

First step to actually preserve the game and not the potential revenue, would be open sourcing it(At least the engine part). Especially on online only games, i find it quite annoying that just out of greed for potential revival, they wont allow a game to live on in the hands of the community.

From the technical point of view that is indeed a quite interesting topic though. I tried once to bring a godot2 game to godot3. I stopped after several hours of suffering. Can't imagine how annoying it gets when next to what tech the game is based on, they are also heavily dependent on other tools, like launchers(as he states with origin).
One example that comes to mind there in free games(next to @dulsi work of course ;)) is unknown horizons. Game is based on a broken and discontinued engine, so it makes more sense to remake it completely with a different engine, rather than trying to keep working on the original game.

dulsi

Elouin I disagree that open sourcing is a key to preservation. At least if open source is simply dumping the source code. You mentioned how you couldn't update a godot2 game to godot3 or the problems unknown horizons has. You need to put effort in making sure people can build your game. For commercial software making it easy to build is not usually a high priority. Even if you invest in that, it does no good for open sourcing if some parts use licensed closed source tools. The EA methodology is great in that it ensures it can make an update to a game.

I was talking to the developers of Sinistar: Unleashed a while back. After it was out for a while and didn't do amazing, a magazine wanted to include it with their free disk. The company agreed but they couldn't build it anymore and they needed to remove the copy protection. They used a crack from the internet to release the game.

Despite my experience with building programs, I still run across open source games I can't get running. Having a virtual machine that could build the program would be a little bit better.

Peter

Yes, I think greed is the central aspect. For example there are several pen and paper RPGs which weren't a commercial success and so they were published online gratis. As soon as the publishers noticed an increased interest in these games they deleted the gratis files and sold paper editions again. I know 4 different RPGs where this happened. And it is pure greed. So don't expect business people from the proprietary world to open source their games. They are too greedy for that.

Greetings
Peter

Peter

@dulsi True! But isn't open-sourcing the first step anyway?

Greetings
Peter

Elouin

The vast majority, especially of online only games, are just gone for good. And i think open sourcing them, even though it might be quite tricky to build them, is a way better way to go, then just letting it die. And people that are willing to reverse engineer the server part and possibly having lawyers knock on their door, would be willing to figure out how to build something, if that would be another viable option(won't link any PServer of a dead game, because of reasons).

And games like wz2100 wouldn't be where they are today if the code wouldn't have been released. In general i can't think of an example other than 7k2 where no one bothered and tried to build it/get to know the codebase.

Technopeasant

The point that having source code is not in and of itself preservation is relevant. I have been spending a bit of time digging into old free software games of late and it is often way easier to just Wine the old Windows ports than it is to try and build the old Linux source code, not because Win32 was a superior platform but because the effort to preserving it has been made.

ntech_

Technopeasant Maybe there's going to be similar irony when decades from now. It isn't too hard to imagine most of the free games that people bother to run still being those that have been packaged as snaps or flatpaks.

Technopeasant

That does strike me as reasonably likely. For older FLOSS games I often end up using the RPM Sphere repository on Fedora to install them, despite the fact that the repo is not considered the most secure. I kind of prefer installing games via Flatpak over the repos these days, despite not being inclined to install applications this way.

dulsi

One of the good things about distro packages is that you can see how they built the program. I do worry that flatpak may end up with projects that are open source but you have no idea how to build it.

Peter

dulsi that you can see how they built the program.

You can? I didn't know that. I thought that they are just packages of binary files with info where to put them and about prerequisites. (Except SRPMs but that's not what you meant I guess.)

Greetings
Peter

dulsi

SRPMs are what I'm talking about. You can look at the spec file and see how the code was built. I assume debs have the same sort of source package or repo you can get the source from. If the documentation for a program is unclear how to build it but it is packaged for fedora, you can see what options they use to build it. Fedora also does a mass rebuild every release so you know how to build and that the release of Fedora can build it. (Technically an earlier release can build it since failure to build doesn't immediately cause the package to be removed.) If the package is a flatpak, there may be no information on how that was built.

Peter

I think that perhaps the easiest and most efficient way to preserve proprietary games is writing an emulator for the computer or console. Then you need a way to extract the game file(s) from the old disc/cartridge. That's it! Or am I missing something? (Of course, it is much cooler to have the source code at hand and licensed libre.)

Greetings
Peter

dulsi

Peter Well the video was about preserving it in a way you could build more DLC later or use as a starting base for a remaster. Emulators won't help you with that.

Emulators are great. It is too bad it is becoming harder to make them. Many console games are bought digitally. Few games don't have updates which require authentication with the console's network system.

Peter

I must admit there are many things I don't understand in this video.

I wonder if dividing the game into three parts might help preserving a game.

Part 1 are the assets, the story, some game-specific (not genre-typical) logic.
Part 2 is a high performance graphics library
Part 3 the game's core (code).

This seems like a helpful idea to me but I might be wrong.

Greetings
Peter

deca12

Yes, and the same for Flash games (whether they were free or not).

Peter

deca12 I'm not sure about Flash. Didn't they pull the plug? Is there an open source Flash "runner"?

dulsi

Peter There are open source flash runners but flash had a lot of quirks. Reproducing them all is really difficult. To my knowledge most flash runners can only run a subset of content. Since flash is dead, a lot of content is also being removed without attempting to preserve it. Granted a lot is probably not worth preserving but I wish I could have played Achievement Unlocked.