<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/06/after-33-years-gamestop-shuts-down-and-disappears-game-informer/>
"Well this is a real punch in the gut. For years, we have been talking about a
strange lack of interest within the video game industry when it comes to game
preservation. In far, far too many cases, both single player and multiplayer
video games that rely on backend checks to start the game, or online servers on
which to play them, or games being available in digital storefronts essentially
disappear at the whim of game publishers’ desire to keep them available. Never
mind that this can mean that games people purchased become unavailable to them.
Never mind that these publishers
could make their games’ source code
available so that fans could keep them running. It all just goes away without
recourse for the public, due to the fact that these games remain protected by
copyright, despite their being unavailable to the public, thereby breaking the
supposed copyright contract. It’s a massive problem if you care about the
preservation of culture.
But surely when it comes to something like journalism surrounding the games
industry the thinking would be different… right? Nobody is going to let decades
of journalistic output just suddenly get disappeared out of nowhere…
right?
When it comes to
Game Informer, the GameStop owned video game magazine that
has been in production for over three decades, that’s exactly what just
happened."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
