I think it’s stupid that this behavior is considered worthy of an article. This is how we should be handling this all the time. If the values change, then update the content rating, but don’t touch the content. And for some reason the norm right now is to completely memory hole anything that doesn’t fit the values. I should have been clearer with my comment.
Unrelated to video games but Taylor Swift has a song where she threatens to tell the friends of her Ex that he’s gay for breaking up with her. This has since been replaced entirely with a new line and can’t be found on anything but the original 2006 release.
She changed the lyrics of a song called Better Than Revenge where she basically calls a girl who “stole” her man a whore.
Can you still legally obtain a copy of the 2006 version? Because with music, if it’s a separate release, it doesn’t affect the past work. This is all, obviously, just my opinion. I feel that games suffer from the effects of this more because often when a “remaster” comes out for a 15 year old game, then it’s the only way to play it, because there’s no legal way to obtain a new copy of the old version.
Now that I think about I think the real difference is that games and other software require constant support, then music audio files don’t. Most people do consume music from a streaming platform, but you can still buy most of it in a physical format that you then are allowed to content shift to a format you can actually play. And theoretically once the copyright runs out, it can be shared. Although Disney has been ruining that for a while now. Games, for the most part are less “stable”. And since there’s almost no legal protection for people sharing old dead games, then the remasters can effectively erase prior art if they change content.
