87% of Video Games Being Lost to Time #Shorts

We’re on the verge of a historical catastrophe: According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of retro and vintage video games are at risk of being lost forever. They came up with this number by looking at a random sample of over 4,000 titles across a range of years and hardware. And just to make a lot of you feel old: this doesn’t only mean games that were like on the Commodore64 or Atari 2600, But even as recently as the Playstation 2. Right, apparently only 12% of the games published on the platform -- which is the most popular ever -- are readily available today. Got further back to something like the Game Boy portable and it’s just 6%. For older consoles it kinda makes sense: Less popular games just aren’t bought and sold and eventually work their way out of circulation. But in the digital age it’s hard to see how newer games get lost “forever.” Well, you only need to see what happened to the 3DS and WiiU to get an idea of how it happens.
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Produced by: Cory Ray, Philip DeFranco
Edited by: James Girardier, Maxwell Enright, Julie Goldberg, Christian Meeks
Art Department: William Crespo
Writing/Research: Brian Espinoza, Philip DeFranco
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#PlayStation #Nintendo #Gaming

[Kilonovae]

If a company pulls a Nintendo and pulls something from all shopfronts it should be legally classed as Abandonware and become public domain

[PasxalkA]

that's why piracy and emulation are essential

[Dr._Elysium]

What's even sadder is that a lot of modern games are tied to servers and once those are gone the game goes with them.

[augustmadsen]

In Denmark, when you make a creative work, including video games, you have to hand in two copies to the royal archive to be preserved

[KulJul]

Any media taken off the market and old enough should become public property and be free to share/pirate.

[justinfowler]

The sad part of new games they're all online. So from time the server goes online, there is a limited lifespan. Eventually the servers will be shutdown.

[fourkz]

The PS2 is infamous for having games that are inaccessible to most gamers, there's a bunch of horror titles that didn't sell super well that now go for thousands of dollars on resale.

[RusticRonnie]

This did not account for emulation.

Basically for PS2 there are games that were listed as Unknown if available because of PCSX2 including games you may have played like Ghost in the shell, which was actually removed from unknown once it was added to vimms.

just so im clear, its slightly misleading because most games were listed as unclear if preservation has happened. And emulation seemed not to count

[pigsinspace]

I think this "catastophe" would be worse if so many people hadn't already preserved 99% of these games and have them regularly avalable to download

[ReinBelmont]

"Nintendo, where can I buy this game?"
"You can't 😊"
"Aight, I'll pirate it"
"😡"

[Prime_Rabbit]

Abandonware needs to be legally considered public domain

[TheDownables]

After 25 - 30 years of the game not receiving updates it should be available and free for anyone to play digitally. Kind of like a patent license going into the public domain. It would allow people to preserve/play older titles well not destroying a company's business.

[elwen]

Piracy needs to be recognized as a failed service rather than theft. All of these games are readily available on the internet

[Sleepy-Shortcake]

Him showing skyward sword while apologizing about making us feel old hit me in my core

[GUNMOFO]

Microsoft tried really hard with the backwards compatibility program. It baffles me how so many titles are being kept out of preservation efforts because of licensing and rights to publishing simply being hot potatoed.

[joeyhamilton]

I mean there were so much shovelware on old consoles. It would be more interesting to see this run if it was only calculating the top 100 or top 1000 games of each year

[bexthewitch]

I will forever mourn my selling of my copy of Fatal Frame 2. I no longer have a PS2 and all copies I have found are far too expensive. We need these older games in our libraries again!

[Skippyxlxlxl]

I really want some thing like the Wayback machine for gaming so that companies have to put it onto that website that’s similar to the Wayback machine just in case the game gets lost forever.

[contytub]

Greed ... greed ... greed ... they launch a game, sell it, support it for some time and then remove it for new game even if the game reached maturity and doesn't needs support anymore . Happens in all industries

[McSeal]

Video Games are mostly the companies' private company.
However, pulling a video game out of their store so no one can buy or play it is essentially a homeowner putting old furniture on the sidewalk waiting for the garbage truck.