This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      36·
      2 years ago

      That’s the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
          8·
          2 years ago

          As long as you are very serious about your backup system, digital can outlast physical.

          • Naz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            I have a folder on my D: called OLDINSTALL.

            It’s my entire hard drive from 1996, including DOS.

            I think it’s a couple hundred megabytes in size, but the vast majority of the files and games were exclusively in floppy disk format.

            I don’t have a floppy drive or any disks anymore.

                • millie@lemmy.filmEnglish
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.

                  We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.

                  Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?

                  They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
          81·
          2 years ago

          It is literally the other way around.

          There is no way for digital media to degrade, unless it is the physical media.

            • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              81·
              2 years ago

              experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades

              That just means Youtube’s software uses lossy compression, that is a Youtube problem, not a digital media problem. Are you familiar with the concept of file hashing? A short string can be derived from a file, such that if any bit of the file is altered, it will produce a different hash. This can be used in combination with other methods to ensure perfect data consistency; for example a file torrent that remains well seeded won’t degrade, because the hash is checked by the software, so if anyone’s copy changes at all due to physical degradation of a harddrive or whatever other reason, the error will be recognized and routed around. If you don’t want to rely on other people to preserve something, there is always RAID, a 50 year old technology that also avoids data changing or being lost assuming that you maintain your hardware and replace disks as they break.

              Here’s the fundamental reason you’re wrong about this: computers are capable of accounting for every bit, conclusively determining if even one of them has changed, and restoring from redundant backup. If someone wants to perfectly preserve a digital file and has the necessary resources and knowledge, they can easily do so. No offense but what you are saying is ignorant of a basic property of how computers work and what they are capable of.

                • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                  11·
                  2 years ago

                  Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks

                  Yes, and this can be done through mostly automatic or distributed processes.

                  even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.

                  I wouldn’t describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.

                  but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer

                  It isn’t hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.

                  We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.

                  All of these problems boil down to intent. Do people intend to preserve a file, do they not care, do they actively favor degradation? In the case of the OP game, it seems that the latter must be the case. Same with Youtube, same with all those media companies removing shows and movies entirely from all public availability, same with a lot of companies. If someone wants to preserve something, they choose the correct algorithms, simple as that. There isn’t necessarily much of a tradeoff for efficiency and ease of use in doing so, disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, the technology is mature and not complicated to use. Long term physical storage can be a part of that, but it isn’t a replacement for intent or process.

            • pikmeir@lemmy.worldEnglish
              61·
              2 years ago

              You’re referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.

        • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          Games don’t get lossy compressed when sent. They aren’t films or photographs.

        • lightnegative@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          Err, no. Lossless compression is lossless and there are a bunch of techniques to ensure that a copy is bit-for-bit identical to the original