Commercial availability specifically. Thanks to archivers and the such, there are usually options to play most things. While I personally don’t care about commercially buying most of these classics, I do find it odd how little ip owners seem to want to make some of these older titles available
Well most of the comments here don’t have an insight into this. The reason they don’t re-release video games or old movies is because they don’t want you enjoying old things. It’s capitalism, but it’s not arbitrary like the scarcity. Because it’s not just video games, no company wants to re-release anything. Not a tractor, not a movie, not a dishwasher, nothing.
Why? Because then you don’t buy the new thing with higher margins. Then you don’t watch the new movie and they can’t sell the new ads with the new character designs promoting it. Or you don’t get locked in to their new cartridge system. Or subscription plan. Whatever. The song is different, the story is the same, new stuff make line go up faster. With tons of waste involved as well.
The reason they don’t re-release video games or old movies is because they don’t want you enjoying old things.
You’re assuming nefarious intent. I suspect the reality is that it’s not worth the rights holders’ time or money to invest in re-releasing old titles that very few people would buy.
Right, I figure re-releasing a game takes some amount of labor, which means someone needs to make a case for spending time on that instead of whatever the current priorities are.
That makes the efforts of archivists all the more commendable, and it’s all the more frustrating when you see a company dedicating resources to shutting them down.
I think one of the exceptions to this is music. Of course there’s top 40 and whatnot, but it’s one of the areas where older hits either don’t go away, or get repackaged algorithmically into let’s say “stuff from that decade you like that you’ve never heard before.”
Of course it’s still being selected from a much larger sample. But I think there’s something different about music.
I think music gets treated differently in this way partly because the fidelity 50 years ago was already very acceptable compared to the fidelity of brand new music, meanwhile you compare any other media and there’s significant improvements in the graphical fidelity that even movies from within this century can be poor enough video quality to degrade the experience compared to a new release
There’s such a weird attitude around release of old material. Why can’t Disney+ show the star wars theatrical release? Why won’t Nintendo sell their old titles? The only possible outcome is that people get what they want and give the company cash. It’s bizarre.
Disney, at least back in the VHS, and (probably early) DVD days, would purposefully keep their titles in the “vault” and only release a handful of titles at a time for a limited time window.
What it did was create artificial scarcity, and when they put out an “anniversary edition” of Cinderella or whatever, they cashed in.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Lucas didn’t specify Disney agreeing to not releasing the theatrical cuts as a stipulation of the sale. He’s been trying to bury those since the beginning. Last I heard he claimed they were too damaged to release.
Didn’t the theatrical cuts release with the first DVD sets well before the takeover? (Albeit yeah, that’s 480p.)
Thankfully, most companies kinda turn a blind eye to piracy of their back catalog. It’s really mostly Nintendo that gets all bent out of shape about it, and, honestly, they bring it on themselves for essentially vaulting many of their classics(like most of their GameCube games, for example). It really doesn’t help they they slow drip the releases so that only the same old few games are available at launch(I don’t want to play Clu Clu Land or Urban Champion, Nintendo… and I’m someone who likes those black box NES games more than most). Hopefully Nintendo Online solved that issue, but I doubt it.
Anyway, it’s not like anyone is going to miss, say, Major Minor’s Majestic March for Wii. I would like to encourage companies to release more of their stuff, but realistically, it’s out there for anyone savvy enough to get it. We need to fix this stupid broken copyright system.
Their definition of “classic” is rather contrived in my opinion. “Classic” means both old and influential. They ditched the influential part. From their in-depth article:
It’s hard to define exactly what a “classic game” is, but for the sake of this study, we looked at all games released before 2010, which is roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.
Our random list of 1,500 games was taken from MobyGames, a huge community-run database of video games.
I can’t feel sorry for the slow disappearance of some Wii Shovelware from 15 years ago. Time is ruthless to all mediocre media.
Thank god LostWinds didn’t die with WiiWare. (Though playing it with a mouse isn’t really the same, admittedly.) I was so glad when I saw it pop up on Steam.
A lot of trash doesn’t have a reason to be rereleased, for sure, but I think you’re maybe underestimating how many genuinely cool titles get neglected for a heap of dumb, business-related reasons.
Man, we’d really be screwed without piracy and emulators. This number only counts legal availability.
Legitimately, right?
Or are 87% of classic games not able to be found even as ROMs through piracy? 🤔
I mean, there’s a lot of other media that is the same… Like books unavailable to be purchased, but out there at a library or as a PDF online somewhere.
There is a paper book I wanted to buy, but it’s not an option. I can only find a paper version used that is being sold for like $200.
The book is called “Parasite Eve”.
Yes, the game was kind of a loose sequel to the book.
I wanted to see about finding copies of super old books from like medieval times and shit. Just copies, mind you. I could really only find authentic style reproductions done by hand that cost thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I just wanted the contents of the books. To read. Not as, like, a piece of friggin’ art. 😩
Well I doubt those works are copyrighted. So I’d just find the text remove any special formatting or characters and look for a printing service.
