Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
Any game that has a multi player or team aspect will eventually die. Even if the servers stay online forever, it will not be the same experience as if you were there in the moment playing when it was lively.
On the other hand I'm only really speaking of big budget games. I think gaming overall, if we include 'indie games' (which has an increasingly inappropriate connotation, given many "indie" games now have no less scope or depth than big budget games) is in an obvious golden age.
Sure, CS was arguably the most popular and long-lasting of the FPS of that era -- but let's not pretend that that was because of technical superiority, it won out because of gameplay.
I don’t even think you can easily find people to play on pre-1.6 versions of CS these days, even though when I played CS on LAN I had friends who believed CS 1.5 to be the better version and insisted that we play that instead.
Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.
It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.
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The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.
Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems
If there is a will, there is a way.
This is true in modern times as well. Skyrim, for instance, remains a best-in-genre game that (like Counter-Strike) even its own creators are failing to surpass. And if it's not surpassed in the future then people will probably still be playing it in 20 years. By contrast if it turns out that the next Elder Scrolls game manages to take the same formula and just make it better, then Skyrim will probably gradually die off.
On top of which, the author of the IP has increasingly aggravated a significant segment of their fan base.
It’s entirely unfair to expect it to continue to pull numbers similar to a dedicated multiplayer game.
Very few single-player story games have much replayability, though they do exist (usually rogue likes or heavily moddable).
Nox, published by Westwood for example.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hexcells-infinite/id1096540165
No matter how many people I gather we can never experience any part of Concord.
Self-contained, offline, drm free (or at least breakable drm) will probably be immortal but that's a shrinking segment of games.
You can play it offline one player or split-screen with just the disc. You can play it online with the disc and a minimal amount of extra work. https://sylverant.net for instance is a PSO server that supports Dreamcast v1, v2, GameCube v3, Xbox v3, and PSO Episode 3 on GameCube.
There are lots of things that make old games unplayable that you need patches and emulators for.
For example the era of games from MSDOS days often used a different memory setup which modern PCs don't support.
So I own and play Darklands every few years, but it needs a special emulator to play.
Luckily GOG deal with that for you for many old games.
So then they're playable just fine. You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.
That's the crux of the matter, for older games there are many ways to keep playing them potentially forever. But for many newer games this might never be possible, especially for the multiplayer-only or always-online games, on top of the DRM. Maybe some regulation will push developers or publishers to release the components needed to make the game work (remove DRM, release the online components, etc.) once it's no longer offered for sale.
Only insofar as those PCs and consoles are still circulating, or the platform was big enough to have good emulators (and the distribution format was standard enough that you can still rip the ROM, and the emulators themselves can still be run on modern systems), or the game was big enough for someone to have been willing to write patches for it. If you don't have the technical knowledge and skills to work around these (or you don't have the time), then the game might as well be dead for you.
And of course, it can't have died enough at any point for everyone with a copy to have lost it, which is the fate of a lot of the old text adventures.
But of course, you can run dosbox on windows, too.
Adding them to steam and forcing proton is also simpler than something like bottles for me.
People try to run them on W10/11 and they won't start, the windows compatibility layer hardly gets them up and running.
This comparison is also unfair for a couple more reasons:
- It ignores the fact that when a game was released on CD back then... that's it. No updates. No patches. Nothing. You break it, that's it. Game ending bug that corrupts your save? TOO BAD. Oh, scratched your CD? TOO BAD. Maybe try one of these folk remedies with tooth paste or some such.
- And the flipside of that: that paying for live service games, you get consistent updates, new content, new cosmetics, etc, etc. You also get features like cloud saves. You don't have to worry about managing 100s of CDs or worry about a scratch on them or anything like that.
Is there a problem these days with online-only games being shut down? Yes, absolutely, and I hope the industry moves away from that.
Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
Edit: I also almost forgot, even for users without internet patches for popular games were often distributed on demo discs included with magazines like PC Gamer.
Not every game released today is a live service game and I'm pretty sure people would have had the same objections back in those days.
> Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
People advocating for video game preservation aren't advocating we all go back to CD-ROM. Video game preservation can be done digitally perfectly fine.
What people are advocating for is that games are designed to remain at least functional once the company doesn't deem it financially viable to provide services for that game anymore.
Not folk remedies, you can take it to a game store and most have the equipment to resurface the CD.
SNES era: games are smaller than a single photo or most bundled javascripts / cas
PS1 era: games are smaller than a random electron app
PS2 era: games are smaller than your average update these days