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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

20 years is more than enough to monetize a game, and even most franchises out there (I very much doubt anyone will care about buying an "Angry Birds" game 15 years from now, or even a "Mass Effect" one). But franchises don't even need to be included in this rule. You can just take every game on its own. So Mass Effect 10 would still benefit from 20 years of copyright, while Mass Effect 1 will be in the public domain by then.

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I certainly agree with "most", but there are definitely franchises that have spanned more than 20 years. The first Final Fantasy was released in 1987, the first Zelda a year before.

Yes, I would like to play the original Final Fantasy. I would download that probably right away.

Someone could easily take Myst, (maybe Microsoft or Sony?) and put a good, updated version for ps4 or xbox one or even wii u and sell it for maybe $9.99.

Do you know how cheap classic books are at the bookstore? You can get books by Charles Dickens for like 5.99. If prices go down for video games, an Xbox one compatible set of classic games like Myst from that era would be insanely cheap. I'd buy instantly. I wouldn't have to buy another game for like 10 years, I'd be so busy.

Have you heard of Nintendo's Virtual Console service? They've been doing pretty much exactly this since the Wii launched in 2006: old games for the NES, SNES, Genesis, and more for $5-15~. You can't get the Final Fantasy games, because Square Enix probably thinks having the original games would hurt demand for their expensive remakes, but otherwise their selection is pretty good. For PC games, you have Good Old Games, which sells DRM-free versions of classic PC games tweaked for modern hardware (or ran in an emulator, for the really old ones) with no need for CD serials. The future you wanted is already here! What do you know, they even have Myst:

http://www.gog.com/game/myst_masterpiece_edition

Or you could just Google "no-intro $game_console_of_choice" and get the entire library in minutes that way...

thanks!

Have you played realMYST? It's available on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/63600/.

I wish someone would make a realRiven, etc.

i'll definitely be buying it.

You can get Charles Dickens for free.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37

of course the library also has tons of free literature for you too.

And I think both Square and Nintendo have more than made their money back on those franchises. A 20 year limit on copyright would not have prevented Nintendo from making The Legend of Zelda.

Once a developer makes their money back, the game should go public domain.

Nintendo would still be able to make tons of Zelda games, it's just that there would be good competition with several hundred other studios making Zelda games. They would probably even do a better job than Nintendo and make the top-selling Zelda games.

"Once a developer makes their money back, the game should go public domain."

This is reasonable as a design goal, if you're taking into account risk (I make 10 games, only one meets any success - is the cost of development the money invested only in the one game or also in the other attempts that - for whatever reason - didn't catch on?). I'm leery of it as a hard and fast rule, because it is way to hard to say what costs actually are (/ should be).

We could already have maybe 10,000 Zelda games out by all kinds of creative publishers. Think about the amount of choice you could have if we had this rule in place. Zelda games could be a buck each.

Yes, I wasn't arguing for a stronger copyright - I'm very much on the other side of things. I'm just trying to be sure our discussion is informed by all the relevant facts (in this case, that overwhelmingly franchises do not endure but some do).

Does it matter? There is a free clone of the first Zelda and I don't see how you could argue that it is in any way limiting the monitization of the franchise. If anything, it seems like it would be an excellent marketing move for franchises to release older games for free (even before 20 years).

"Does it matter?"

Maybe. I trying to argue that this meant copyright should be longer, I was trying to make sure our discussion was fully informed.

I actually like the idea of franchises becoming public domain. In many cases it seems that the holder either doesn't care about the IP (Sega properties like Skies of Arcadia, Landstalker or the Oasis series come to mind. Cap com has a bunch too) or they seem least competent in furthering the franchise (George Lucas, Square and now EA with Dungeon Keeper).

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