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Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy? I know that such a thing might have to include server code and some agreements on runtime environment, but I don't see that as insuperable.

This is culture and it's part of our patrimony. The privilege of getting to publish thinga and having copyright protection ought to include responsibilities to the society too.

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> Wouldn't it be nice if the Library of Congress or the Bodleian or some other prestigous clouty institution could demand that these published artworks be given to them as an unencumbered copy?

I agree. It should be a requirement to receive copyright protection. The US Copyright Office should also make those copies available for download on their servers the moment that the work enters the public domain.

The problem is the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running. A game server is a big proprietary ball of spaghetti with hundreds of API endpoints and only the people who built it really know how it works[0]. It's expensive to keep those folks around and expensive to pay for the cloud services and SaaS tools they need to do their jobs.

All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff.

[0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming."

It could be paid by taxes, and run by government. Something like the Internet Archive (not sure if that's public but the entire Internet is much larger than all games put together).

And why not by private entities receiving donations of people that care about preservation?

That could work I guess.

Games with single-player mode must be playable in a fully offline mode. Would solve your (very valid) issue for a large chunk of games.

There is a petition that would require publishers to leave games in a playable state at end-of-life (https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home), but it doesn't look like it will reach the threshold that would require the parliament to respond. It is one of the bigger petitions though, so it might still trigger some action.

Wait, in the EU you can just petition the government and they have to respond after some threshold?

Yes, both at the EU level and also in many countries (EU and non-EU), see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens%27_Initiativ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_initiative

"Some threshold" is doing a lot of work here, since the requirement is a million signatures (which also need to be from multiple countries).

I made a small mistake, the response will be from the Commission, not Parliament, because only the Commission can propose laws anyways - but you do get a hearing in parliament.

But essentially, even crossing the million signature threshold doesn't win you anything but a slightly bigger soap box and the promise of the Commission giving you a "no" in writing rather than just ignoring you. There is no requirement to actually act on it, and no way to force it (unlike e.g. in Switzerland where actual binding popular votes can be initiated with enough signatures).

We have this in the UK too,but it's a waste of time.

You just get a stock/automated response to most petitions.

That said, they are required to set aside some parliamentary time for it and for petitions to be "debated".

This might be solved in future by more advanced LLMs as long as binaries are preserved.

What your saying is true BUT. Your are talking about keeping servers (plural ?) running but, for conservancy, you should not need a full fledge cloud. It not about keeping it running for millions of customers. It's about being able to run for research to study games in the long run. One server that can handle a couple or two clients should be enough for conservancy.

People are the harder problem. A game server is not a box you turn on and it just runs. The platforms themselves change under you all the time as do all the SaaS tools you rely on. Clients change all the time, too, and one missed update can make your game unrunnable. Folks don't want to train or pay the humans needed to keep server-based games alive.

Easy; if you don't want to pay for keeping up with SaaS, don't use SaaS! This is an entirely self-inflicted problem, and it's on you (as in, the gamedev) to fix it.

> All software has a "lifecycle" and has to be turned off at some point because no one is willing to pay the costs of keeping it running (with hosting and client changes as ongoing moving targets). We see this even with games that have sales! So ones that don't have sales are not likely to attract anyone to pay for such staff. [0] Source: I spent 2 years inside a studio owned by "big gaming.

You mean SAAS has a life cycle.

Software itself can be run by people willing to keep it running.

The whole "software should be turned off" comment is you trying to change perception about what software is.

The comparison is vs. games on physical media. Many Atari 2600 game cartridges still work, more than 40 years after they were originally manufactured. You can still use them in a new Atari 2600+/7800+ console.

Then how do unofficial WoW, Diablo 2 or Lineage 2 servers exist? Enthusiasts run them for free.

Due to huge reverse engineering efforts which few games get, especially after the official servers have already shut down so there's no reference implementation anymore. For every game which gets unofficial servers, a few dozen never will.

So people can run servers even without the server source code, and the problem preventing leaving the server code to the Library of Congress, etc. is not "the cost and knowledge base required to keep servers running".

...therefore it shouldn't be preserved at all? This doesn't follow.

No one mentioned running the code, just persisting it for the future public good

Yes that would be nice. It could definitely be a non-profit and get a lot of support. Then they could grant access to past games that are no longer on the market. Ideally anyone can just make their own backups without publishing the copy. I still think there are solutions to allow this but companies want games a service to make more money.

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