2:31 I’ve been passionate about older games since I was a little kid. I would play Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64 on my dads laptop. This was over a decade past the release of these games.
Great video! Personally I'm a proponent of shorter copyright in general, especially for video games which evolve so quickly that it's difficult to say a game from even ten years ago has really held onto its value in the modern marketplace. In the meantime, when it comes to games preservations, I think of King Henry VIII and Protestantism. How the churches of England were forced to destroy all their Catholic stained glass windows by law, and how the only Christian art from before the reformation that still exists was saved because nuns broke the law and buried artefacts to keep them safe. What they did was illegal, but it saved art and pieces of history that would otherwise have been lost forever.
100%, I am a PC gamer and I LOVE piracy, I never pirate games that I can buy legally in good condition but I’m so glad piracy exists as without I would’ve been unable to play tons of games I love. Even the other day, I wanted to play Deus Ex Human Revolution, but because it had steam DRM and they replaced the digital versions with a crappy Wii U port full of bugs, I had no choice but to pirate as I couldn’t even buy a used disc, even if I paid £70 to get a second hand sealed copy I wouldn’t be able to use it because modern windows doesn’t support old disc DRM. Luckily though, I found an old pirate repack and managed to install it. I will always support piracy of delisted games to preserve them. I myself am hosting some delisted files for preservation, for example the original Sonic CD steam port which is now delisted, and a copy of Sonic 3 A.I.R which can’t be installed anymore because Sega delisted the original version of Sonic 3 on steam.
I think if you disagree with piracy both as a preservation tool and a way to defend against corporate anti-consumer practices you need only look at the 'Games For Windows Live' debacle which has rendered millions of tonnes of plastic useless. If you have a disc labelled with GFWL, you cannot play it because of the "anti piracy" system that is now offline forever.
100% this. I have the Games for Windows Live physical disc release of Halo 2 and when Games for Windows Live died, the only way I could play it was to, somewhat ironically, use piracy cracks. Likewise, when Batman Arkham Asylum transitioned from GfW to just normal Steam, I lost all of my saves and had to start over.
I think I'd kinda allow piracy as a form of preservation. Maybe not a valid or preferred one, but if it keeps _alive_ then I suppose I'd allow it. Great video!
Pirates aren't the heroes we deserve, but it's the role they've accidentally found themselves in... or something witty that actually fits the Batman quote I'm trying to reference and repurpose.
Piracy is most often the product of consumers not having easy access to something or the price outweighing the current market demand. Personally I don't condemn piracy as in alot of cases these are people in the above categories who would NOT have purchased the game because of said categories.
I don't think the intent of piracy was preservation or making games obtainable to all regardless of income. I think it was most likely greed / a sense of entitlement / refusal to pay - especially when it comes to newly released titles. It feels like piracy has accidentally ended up serving as our best form of preservation as a weird side effect more than anything.
Piracy to me is more than game preservation, it is Capitalism at its core. Piracy is an inevitable reaction to poor business policy. Nintendo is still selling Super Mario World that is true, but it is also sold with a caveat of buying the Switch's subscription service, that will be inevitably shut down like the EShop. You're paying MORE for something you don't own. You're paying more for the ACCESS to it. Once the Switch shuts down, it takes all the games with it. Thats not even going into the 3D All Stars debacle. If Nintendo wants people to stop emulation of their games, stop giving them a reason to. Simply put, If people cannot get a product for a fair price, they'll get it somewhere.
I'm not sure I would agree with that. A fair price is relative. £69.99 for a newly released game is a lot of money to some and spare change to others. I try to keep it as binary as "Is the product available to buy first-hand?" Once we start adding qualifiers like "Is it the best version?" "Is it to own or rent?" We can do some mental gymnastics to justify pirating pretty much anything.
@@WebstersTH-cam I don’t know if I agree with your point, if you don’t consider cost and quality Sega could relaunch a crap and buggy compilation of four 30 year old games for $50 and delist all the other versions, and pirating would be completely unreasonable as the game is still available. Or Rockstar could delist all the versions of their famous game franchise and launch a broken and unfinished trilogy with terrible new art direction and a million bugs, based off of a heavily disliked mobile port for full price. Or Square Enix could delist a perfectly working PC port and replace it with a broken and buggy Wii U-based port that never received an update, and pirating the original would be wrong even though it’s physically impossible to use real discs anymore due to DRM. All of these things have actually happened, and without piracy the previously existing and superior versions would be completely unavailable. I will only pirate if I’m forced into it, or the legal option is significantly worse than pirating, but I will always pirate if I need to without feeling guilty at all.
To me, pirates are always the "accidental heroes" of preservation, Panzer Bandits was a beat-em-up PS1 game that i liked and is quite niche and no one talked about it back in the PS1 era, not to mention it was JP exclusive. the only reason i knew and played the game at all? Pirates From what i see so far if we are talking about video game preservation there are 2 big arguments on who should do the preserving. A) Game Companies should do the preserving. This ensures accessibility, convenience, and legality from the customer side of the equation and the only thing that hinders this is licensing problems for some games, the biggest example of this is Xbox Game Pass where you can play old Xbox games (the first Xbox, not Xbox One GOD FUCKING DAMNIT CONFUSING NAME IS CONFUSING!). However the risks that shows is that game companies tends to cherry pick their old games, usually ones with the "cult hit" status (read : reviewed well, sold like shit) or super popular games that was very very old so not all games get the same chance, especially the experimental ones. Even after getting cherry picked there are times where remakes/remasters/ports are totally inferior to the original (Silent Hill HD Collection springs to mind), another risk is sold at a price a bit too tall alongside the previous risk (SMT Nocturne HD Remaster on Steam). B) The gaming community should do the preserving. However there are no official community "Games History Preservation Committee" that i know of so the biggest con in this side is that wanted or not you gotta sail the high seas for a pirated copy. This ensures that almost every single games on this very Earth have the same chance to be preserved as the community can be a bit more thorough on the searching side with the cost of speed and sometimes accessibility and convenience (jumping through some hoops to play some games via emulation usually, or jailbreaking and CFW setups. sometimes fan translation is also an issue). Another plus is that almost every version can be preserved so let's say hypothetically for the sake of this argument that you want to play version 1.0 of No Man's Sky for the sake of comparing release version and the current version, the option is there, you just have to charter the high seas of the internet to find the right files. For people who used to play pirated games (or raised by "pirates" for that matter) and jumping through hoops to play them i think they will not mind the hassle because the very old adage of "if there is a will, there is a way" is still true. Me personally? i'm on B, original games on consoles are a too expensive back then so wanted or not piracy is the way. If the games are officially preserved the great! but if not then that's okay since the high seas is as dangerous as it is welcoming for all.
Yeah, but it's only compatible with 20 pin drives in the original oval button model Saturn and I have the later circle buttoned 21 pin drive revision :( The TerraOnion MODE is supposed to work on any Saturn model but is double the price.
Unfortunately, there do exist edge cases, where piracy is indeed working against preservation, such as with modern arcade games. The goal with emulation of those is playability above all else.
It depends on what you mean. No way video game museums are gonna have libraries filled with illegal roms however to your descendants to happen to discover the old drive you kept all your roms and it still works to those people yes absolutely that is indeed preservation. People don’t really talk about this. but private and public preservation are two totally different things, and when it comes to private preservation of media illegal copies of games will be the standard.
2:31 I’ve been passionate about older games since I was a little kid. I would play Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64 on my dads laptop. This was over a decade past the release of these games.
Great video!
Personally I'm a proponent of shorter copyright in general, especially for video games which evolve so quickly that it's difficult to say a game from even ten years ago has really held onto its value in the modern marketplace.
In the meantime, when it comes to games preservations, I think of King Henry VIII and Protestantism. How the churches of England were forced to destroy all their Catholic stained glass windows by law, and how the only Christian art from before the reformation that still exists was saved because nuns broke the law and buried artefacts to keep them safe. What they did was illegal, but it saved art and pieces of history that would otherwise have been lost forever.
I didn't know about the stained glass but it's a fantastic example of the disconnect between legality and morality. Good on those nuns! :)
Great video. I support emulation and piracy of old games since it preserves games better than the companies could at the moment.
100%, I am a PC gamer and I LOVE piracy, I never pirate games that I can buy legally in good condition but I’m so glad piracy exists as without I would’ve been unable to play tons of games I love. Even the other day, I wanted to play Deus Ex Human Revolution, but because it had steam DRM and they replaced the digital versions with a crappy Wii U port full of bugs, I had no choice but to pirate as I couldn’t even buy a used disc, even if I paid £70 to get a second hand sealed copy I wouldn’t be able to use it because modern windows doesn’t support old disc DRM. Luckily though, I found an old pirate repack and managed to install it. I will always support piracy of delisted games to preserve them. I myself am hosting some delisted files for preservation, for example the original Sonic CD steam port which is now delisted, and a copy of Sonic 3 A.I.R which can’t be installed anymore because Sega delisted the original version of Sonic 3 on steam.
I think if you disagree with piracy both as a preservation tool and a way to defend against corporate anti-consumer practices you need only look at the 'Games For Windows Live' debacle which has rendered millions of tonnes of plastic useless. If you have a disc labelled with GFWL, you cannot play it because of the "anti piracy" system that is now offline forever.
100% this. I have the Games for Windows Live physical disc release of Halo 2 and when Games for Windows Live died, the only way I could play it was to, somewhat ironically, use piracy cracks. Likewise, when Batman Arkham Asylum transitioned from GfW to just normal Steam, I lost all of my saves and had to start over.
Don't get me started. It took me *_weeks_* to get Section 8 and Section 8 Prejudice to run. And I *_still_* haven't installed the patches or DLC.
I think I'd kinda allow piracy as a form of preservation. Maybe not a valid or preferred one, but if it keeps _alive_ then I suppose I'd allow it.
Great video!
Pirates aren't the heroes we deserve, but it's the role they've accidentally found themselves in... or something witty that actually fits the Batman quote I'm trying to reference and repurpose.
On Disc DLC is especially shitty, you physically own the additional content, but have no way to access it, wether you had to pay originally or not.
Capcom were notorious for this in the PS3 generation.
@@WebstersTH-cam Namco too, they wanted over £250 to unlock everything that was on the disc in air combat.
That’s the best part of being a PC gamer, someone will mod that into being useful.
Imagine the amount of abandonware games that you can't even play without pirating.
Piracy is most often the product of consumers not having easy access to something or the price outweighing the current market demand. Personally I don't condemn piracy as in alot of cases these are people in the above categories who would NOT have purchased the game because of said categories.
I don't think the intent of piracy was preservation or making games obtainable to all regardless of income. I think it was most likely greed / a sense of entitlement / refusal to pay - especially when it comes to newly released titles. It feels like piracy has accidentally ended up serving as our best form of preservation as a weird side effect more than anything.
aaah yes remember what Gabe Newell said : Piracy is a problem of service, not pricing. Take that as you will
Piracy to me is more than game preservation, it is Capitalism at its core. Piracy is an inevitable reaction to poor business policy. Nintendo is still selling Super Mario World that is true, but it is also sold with a caveat of buying the Switch's subscription service, that will be inevitably shut down like the EShop. You're paying MORE for something you don't own. You're paying more for the ACCESS to it. Once the Switch shuts down, it takes all the games with it. Thats not even going into the 3D All Stars debacle. If Nintendo wants people to stop emulation of their games, stop giving them a reason to.
Simply put, If people cannot get a product for a fair price, they'll get it somewhere.
I'm not sure I would agree with that. A fair price is relative. £69.99 for a newly released game is a lot of money to some and spare change to others.
I try to keep it as binary as "Is the product available to buy first-hand?" Once we start adding qualifiers like "Is it the best version?" "Is it to own or rent?" We can do some mental gymnastics to justify pirating pretty much anything.
@@WebstersTH-cam I don’t know if I agree with your point, if you don’t consider cost and quality Sega could relaunch a crap and buggy compilation of four 30 year old games for $50 and delist all the other versions, and pirating would be completely unreasonable as the game is still available. Or Rockstar could delist all the versions of their famous game franchise and launch a broken and unfinished trilogy with terrible new art direction and a million bugs, based off of a heavily disliked mobile port for full price. Or Square Enix could delist a perfectly working PC port and replace it with a broken and buggy Wii U-based port that never received an update, and pirating the original would be wrong even though it’s physically impossible to use real discs anymore due to DRM.
All of these things have actually happened, and without piracy the previously existing and superior versions would be completely unavailable. I will only pirate if I’m forced into it, or the legal option is significantly worse than pirating, but I will always pirate if I need to without feeling guilty at all.
To me, pirates are always the "accidental heroes" of preservation, Panzer Bandits was a beat-em-up PS1 game that i liked and is quite niche and no one talked about it back in the PS1 era, not to mention it was JP exclusive. the only reason i knew and played the game at all? Pirates
From what i see so far if we are talking about video game preservation there are 2 big arguments on who should do the preserving.
A) Game Companies should do the preserving. This ensures accessibility, convenience, and legality from the customer side of the equation and the only thing that hinders this is licensing problems for some games, the biggest example of this is Xbox Game Pass where you can play old Xbox games (the first Xbox, not Xbox One GOD FUCKING DAMNIT CONFUSING NAME IS CONFUSING!). However the risks that shows is that game companies tends to cherry pick their old games, usually ones with the "cult hit" status (read : reviewed well, sold like shit) or super popular games that was very very old so not all games get the same chance, especially the experimental ones. Even after getting cherry picked there are times where remakes/remasters/ports are totally inferior to the original (Silent Hill HD Collection springs to mind), another risk is sold at a price a bit too tall alongside the previous risk (SMT Nocturne HD Remaster on Steam).
B) The gaming community should do the preserving. However there are no official community "Games History Preservation Committee" that i know of so the biggest con in this side is that wanted or not you gotta sail the high seas for a pirated copy. This ensures that almost every single games on this very Earth have the same chance to be preserved as the community can be a bit more thorough on the searching side with the cost of speed and sometimes accessibility and convenience (jumping through some hoops to play some games via emulation usually, or jailbreaking and CFW setups. sometimes fan translation is also an issue). Another plus is that almost every version can be preserved so let's say hypothetically for the sake of this argument that you want to play version 1.0 of No Man's Sky for the sake of comparing release version and the current version, the option is there, you just have to charter the high seas of the internet to find the right files. For people who used to play pirated games (or raised by "pirates" for that matter) and jumping through hoops to play them i think they will not mind the hassle because the very old adage of "if there is a will, there is a way" is still true.
Me personally? i'm on B, original games on consoles are a too expensive back then so wanted or not piracy is the way. If the games are officially preserved the great! but if not then that's okay since the high seas is as dangerous as it is welcoming for all.
Maybe they protected their old games for the sake of "possible rerelease"
Have you thought about the fenrir ode for the saturn? I'm thinking about picking one up when I get a saturn. Seems easy enough for somebody like me :P
Yeah, but it's only compatible with 20 pin drives in the original oval button model Saturn and I have the later circle buttoned 21 pin drive revision :( The TerraOnion MODE is supposed to work on any Saturn model but is double the price.
Unfortunately, there do exist edge cases, where piracy is indeed working against preservation, such as with modern arcade games. The goal with emulation of those is playability above all else.
Great video. I definitely agree
It depends on what you mean. No way video game museums are gonna have libraries filled with illegal roms however to your descendants to happen to discover the old drive you kept all your roms and it still works to those people yes absolutely that is indeed preservation. People don’t really talk about this. but private and public preservation are two totally different things, and when it comes to private preservation of media illegal copies of games will be the standard.
YES!
YES. yes it is.
since pirated games are usually drm free, there is nothing that is between the consumer and the game. so its easier to keep forever.
Yes. Alright pack your bags guys
Yes
Glad ive keep my one woow nasty
Yes.
Nintendo reinforced this now lol
No it's (most of the time) just stealing
In Piracy We Trust. Long Live Piracy 🏴☠️🦜