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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Between DRM, DLC, mandatory connectivity and the end of physical media, the future will look back on this era as the 'dark age' of digital gaming history. Maintaining activation servers, cloud storage and digital delivery costs money. If it doesn't disappear when the title reaches EOL, it certainly does when the company is gone or shifts business models. And draconian copyright laws create legal jeopardy around orphaned games from long-dead companies while the DMCA makes it illegal to remove DRM.

We simply have no way to preserve games.

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For now, it's still possible to crack consoles and extract the games from disk. However, we are probably approaching an era where encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.

However, the flip side is that so many games are built using common game engines, and receive multi-platform releases. So there's a broader surface area for potential preservation. Maybe the PS6 version is permanently dead, but the PC version lives on.

Sony in particular is doubling down on platform exclusives again. I was waiting for Ghost of Yōtei to come out on PC, but Sony cancelled the port. We're well and truly fucked without physical media for exclusives like this.

Except Sony is notoriously bad at actually securing their consoles.

It shouldn't be the case that this is relied upon. There needs to be a cultural shift in the industry back to physical - or at least, preservable - media.

The PS5 has been pretty secure (though, not perfect). They learned their lesson from the PS4 and took some pages out of the Microsoft playbook - brought back the hypervisor and implemented e-fuses.

Byepervisor did crack the hypervisor, but it requires an old version of the firmware and the console has to be kept offline to avoid being upgraded. There's no mechanism to downgrade the firmware like there was with the PS4, which limits the blast radius of potential jailbreaks.

Of course, even offline consoles can be updated, since games can ship with firmware updates required need to play the game.

All true, but you don’t need to crack the hypervisor to play cracked games, and if you manage to jailbreak your console there are game backports for older firmware versions.

Also, there are unreleased kernel exploits (i.e. jailbreaks) even for the most recent firmware versions, which will inevitably come out in the future.

The scene is not as mature as PS4, but a lot of progress was made this year.

Maybe AI will change that.

That’s the crux, safe software is like an unbreakable lock. It can keep safe what you value or it can lock you in|out.

You lot really ought to stop with “AI will solve that” statements. It’s like watching a child play with Siri thinking it is a real person. C’mon now.

You read the "maybe"?

And the rest of my statement isn’t about AI but about secure software.

Then let them turn into SEGA.

Just don't buy them.

Are you a drone controlled by FOMO?

They didn't say they were buying them. It is just undeniably a bad thing that you can't buy it without DRM. You can say "just don't buy it", but that doesn't make the existence of the DRM any better.

>However, we are probably approaching an era where encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.

If AI lives up to its promise then in 5-10 years it should be possible (and affordable) to just point an AI at the screen and let it clone all the graphics, then have it implement the engine.

If the game doesn't run in 5-10 years because of some licensing, DRM, physical, or other SNAFU, then there will be no game for the bot to observe.

If just one of any number of millenarian cults live up to their promise then in 5-10 years we can play any game we want with Jesus up in heaven.

> encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.

I highly doubt this. The platforms that didn't have any jailbreaking scenes weren't because the devices were so secure; it was because there was not enough demand for it. If given enough time, there will always be hacks and bypasses just like Denuvo or hypervisor bypass like the recent hack.

You can doubt this. But the fact is, the Xbox One was secure for it's entire operational life without a crack. And the Series X/S has held up as well.

It's completely possible that future consoles are secure enough that the components fail long before the security does.

iirc microsoft also allowed installing homebrew without cracking the console, which definitely was a conttibuting factor. Why hack the console if you can just install your own software already.

And it isn't like any xbox console exclusives come to mind, all their stuff comes out on pc too.

Arguably there was not much interest on those platforms. I believe you will be right eventually when physical access of the actual machines are kept away from us, so it’s a matter of solving the latency issue.

There just isn't a demand for it. Have you seen just how dedicated nintendo hackers are? Check out decomp.dev https://decomp.dev/

Decompliation is nothing compared to the effort and technical know-how required to jailbreak / exploit the Xbox One.

The Xbox One might be single handledly the most complex and secure piece of human hardware. [1] (Highly recommend watching this talk).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTFn4UZsA5U

I disagree. Demand for pirated games is still huge, so I don’t think the lack of hacks is just down to lack of interest. Everything points to these protections getting stronger over time. Denuvo, hypervisor-based security, and the recent Xbox hacks all suggest the same thing: bypasses still happen, but they’re becoming harder, slower, and more specialised. I’m not saying future systems will be impossible to crack, but the trend seems to be that beating them is getting harder, not easier.

https://blog.ihaveahax.net/2025/06/03/more-details-on-why-th...

Just these big titles. The indie scene is thriving really well. I'd say let AAA die, we don't really need massively expensive cultural production to enable us to tell stories to each other

Game companies should have to submit full copies of everything to run the game , servers and clients to the Library of Congress or Smithsonian for preservation

They should do legal deposit in the country the game is developed. Some places they have to. The Hitman series is in the collection of national library of Denmark.

Why?

Is there a lower form of “art” than always online AAA garbage?

Im not going to lose any sleep over _COD 75: More of the Same Bullshit_ becoming lost media

Most art is garbage, doesn't mean it's okay to make it inaccessible by fiat.

Let’s take all these games as great artworks - why don’t their creators have the right to destroy them?

All my own art is derivative schlock, so maybe I’m biased, but I don’t see how the viewer/consumer whoever has any say in the matter. The show is over when it’s over.

Should be compel musicians to record every live performance and make those available to people who couldn’t make it to the show too?

What if someone was in the bathroom during their favorite song, should we compel an encore?

Maybe it’s ok for some things to be ephemeral.

> Let’s take all these games as great artworks - why don’t their creators have the right to destroy them?

Because they sold them. They put it out in the world. If they just made it and then immediately destroyed it, wonderful! But they didn't.

And, also, their creators are not a monolith. They were worked on by hundreds of hands. The production company shouldn't get to unilaterally make that decision.

> Should be compel musicians to record every live performance and make those available to people who couldn’t make it to the show too?

This is this and that is that.

> Because they sold them. They put it out in the world. If they just made it and then immediately destroyed it, wonderful! But they didn't.

They sold a pass to play the game while it was open. Just like a swimming pool or a buffet.

Just because we got an executable software instead of a wrist band doesn’t change what it is.

Is the naming convention the sticking point here?

Did we really think it meant “all you can eat until the heat death of the universe”?

> And, also, their creators are not a monolith. They were worked on by hundreds of hands. The production company shouldn't get to unilaterally make that decision.

Why not?

I have never had a say as a developer or designer of other software when the company turned off products, how much we charged customers, what the SLA was etc. etc. etc.

I signed a contract to do a job on a thing. Regardless of how much pride I took in my work I understood the license it would be distributed under and what my role was.

We can form guilds or join coops if we want a say. Labor has pull before and during the work. Get it in writing. After the fact we’re fucked. Welcome to earth. Sucks here but we make do.

> This is this and that is that.

But this is that. They sold us a concert ticket. We checked the checkbox next to the EULA. Nobody made us do it.

I get the ick from this kind of game it so I stopped buying them, except for when I do. Just like I stopped eating Doritos.

I don’t expect something that comes in a colorful crinkly bag at gas station to be healthy and I don’t expect a game sold by some big studio to not be ripping me off.

The idea of interacting with lawyers and politicians to solve the problem of “some of my luxury goods are a bad value” never crossed my mind.

Sorry, but I don't believe in the categorical imperative. This is this and that is that.

> Let’s take all these games as great artworks - why don’t their creators have the right to destroy them?

Because the only reason they received copyright protection in the first place (which is a severe limitation of everyone else's free speech) is to encourage them to contribute to our culture by making the games. You don't get to destroy artworks after the fact that were commissioned and fully paid for.

A lot of lost media used to be considered garbage before it has gotten completely lost. Culture is always worth preserving, at least for historic purposes.

I cannot explain how offensive this is to work of people who work on these games. Years and years of my life working on some incredible AAA games and you call it garbage because it's always online. Like, you think all the effort, all the actual art, music, writing, lore, world building....all of it garbage, because the game is online only? Do you think WoW is garbage and "art" in quotes?

I mean, it's the internet, you can have whatever opinion you want. But imho this is a particularly nasty and unkind opinion.

He thinks AAA games are garbage, not because they are online but because they are AAA. Similar to people's opinions about Marvel films and other high budget productions.

I don't know what you worked on but I'm sure it brought joy to a lot of people.

I’m calling it garbage because the content is boring and the gameplay is tired for well over 99 out of 100 games I see.

The music, visual design, dialogue and “world building” of most games (indie and AAA) is trite recycled junk that without the budget would be indistinguishable from the output of a high school drama club (at best).

That’s before we talk about the cynical stuff like the always online, the loot boxes, the decontenting, the Day 1 dlc, the lack of physical disks you can share with friends or sell to GameStop, the bugs, the prices, etc. etc. etc.

I have failed at enough art and software myself to totally appreciate how much effort it takes to ship something even on the level of the crap that most games are. That doesn’t mean I think that makes them precious and people should be compelled to preserve them. Slop is slop regardless of if it was made by a human or a robot.

People put a lot of effort in to a lot of things that yield boring and or unethical results all the time, I don’t know why people treat games as some special case.

>>I don’t know why people treat games as some special case

Well, clearly.

That's just, like, your opinion man.

I reckon Sony get a few more years of even more profitable rent seeking before the EU regulates them like Apple’s App Store and forces a game purchase to be valid on all platforms it’s playable on.

What would that look like? Genuinely not sure what you're suggesting. Do you mean a PS4 purchase means you have it for life and they must support it (or at least not revoke it)? Or you also get it on PS3/4/5 (as applicable)? Or you get it on PC and Xbox too?

Yes, those things cost money, but the money that we want to make, we want to make it today. And this is how we make it. What economic incentive is there for preservation?

(/takes off devil's advocate hat and puts on flame suit)

The economic incentives will only come when enough people stop buying these kinds of games. Whether or not that will ever happen remains to be seen.

Videogame preservation is on par with other media conservation, like literature; something that's an overall good for humanity as a whole, but not in the mind of the majority of consumers of such media. And that's perfectly OK. Most people just want to consume and forget.

Conservation is a social interest amd must come from organized initiatives, it will never take shape magically from individual judgement.

What economic incentive is there for art museums? Maybe society shouldn't be designed primarily around economic incentives.

Especially when you have a passionate community willing to work for free to preserve things, am I right?

Nintendo has shown the way, for better or worse.

Tightly managed first party IP with a lot of retro throwback games/compilations/crossovers/virtual console and an overly aggressive copyright approach to managing what people do with their IP (even if fair use).

Nintendo plays the long game. They do not compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and the like.

The win/win scenario I think is recognizing there is a market for the preserved titles and putting the effort in to capture that market. There's effort involved in emulating old games to work on modern hardware.

But yes I think you're on to something that Nintendo plays the long game the best, they handle their IPs like Disney does: featuring them across multiple verticals that feed into each other. Its surprising to me how long its taken Nintendo to come back to movies and TV.

Actually now that I think about it, Disney's biggest shortcoming is their video game division despite many wonderful retro Disney and Lucasarts games at their disposal.

Do not get me started on Lucasarts. I would watch the shit out of a Monkey Island show or film.

> We simply have no way to preserve games.

You can spend your money on GOG.com.

Absolute shame, but to be fair the games that ship on disc without any patches are often in no shape to actually be played, so without the corresponding digital patch infrastructure it's already kinda problematic.

Obviously, preservation is in no way in the interest of the companies, they just want to keep selling you the same game over and over as remakes and remasters ad infinitum

Don't forget that a lot of games these days are "live services" that significantly change over their lifetime. What's left to preserve after the developer/publisher gets bored with the game is not the same game that the initial players experienced.

I feel like dark age of gaming started with MTX and since then it’s only getting worse. The fact that we have capable hardware like iPad without a very limited gaming ecosystem system itself shows it.

We have so many problems with the gaming unfortunately, in addition to what you already said, MTX, gambling disguised as loot boxes, console and store exclusives, AAA pricing, lack of creativity in the AAA market etc

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