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Comment by SamuelAdams | Hacker News Reader

At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies. It creates a shortage of playable games so that new games sell and continue to make money.

The biggest competitor to the video game industry is movies (Netflix, Disney plus, etc) and past games.

Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today? If players can play thousands of high quality games for free, why bother paying for a new game?

I suppose the book industry has the same problem, maybe there are some parallels to study from that.

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> Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today?

This is something we can answer pretty easily by looking at the book industry. People do enjoy novelty. The pulp sci-fi/fantasy from the 60s-80s is long forgotten save for a few masterpieces, and there is a flow of recent books that people buy and read.

> At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies.

But they aren’t good for consumers.

Who cares? This is capitalism, it's all about capital, not consumers. Good for capital == will happen.

It would still be illegal to acquire a copy of a killed game. Their numbers would still dwindle, since they'd be limited to people who bought the game before it was killed.

Until copyright runs out.

And as we all know, the book, music and motion picture industries have all ceased operations due to the presence of copyright expiry.

Silly that this is being downvoted, especially since the book industry comparison is an interesting one:

There will always be people like myself who enjoy older (even outdated) books, but even we still buy new books because they are part of the zeitgeist and carry new ideas/developments. It'd be the same for new video games, some people would enjoy older games, but they'd likely still pick up a similar new game that developed something novel.

I guess the real problem here is that video game companies don't want to create anything novel, not least because it's a risk.

I mean, Project Gutenberg and libraries exist and the literature industry hasn't died yet.

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