this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Gaming
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Video games are a very interesting medium to me, when it comes to preservation. With movies, TV, Books, and Music, it is very easy and convenient to experience older content. CDs, DVDs, Bluerays, etc are very easy to play on almost any hardware (if you've invested heavily in Laser Disk, I have some bad news for you, though). Meanwhile any game ever made is largely trapped on the console it was designed for. If I want to show someone Casablanca, I can easily show them; but if I want to show them Ocarina of Time, I would need to have a 30 year old console if you believe Nintendo. This, to me, is absurd since A) Nintendo doesn't make any money even if I do buy the N64 cart, and B) I would need to buy and maintain every console that has a game with any cultural relevance for the foreseeable future.
Emulation is a very useful tool for game preservation. I've heard Nintendo is actually very good internally at game preservation and has original source code from every game they've ever made; but that doesn't do a lot of good when older generation games are left in the Nintendo vault. I wouldn't have a problem with Nintendo being so staunchly anti-emulation if they actually made their older games available, but if you ever want to play games like Chibi-Robo you either need to be OK shelling out ~180 USD for the game and ~80USD for the GameCube, or emulate it
I wonder how much money they'd make if they just put all of there old games on the eShop, like, I cannot think of a good resource my self to just not have access to most though official means, it's just loss sales, and it also hurts your customers
The crazy thing is they did that for a while with the Wii virtual console, and I think they also had a Wii U Virtual Console and a 3DS one as well. The problem is the titles never transferred over, so you had to keep buying them over and over (though this is still preferable to the current NES/SNES/GBC Virtual Consoles in the NSO subscription). One of the things I think Microsoft actually does well is their Backwards Compatibility. If you buy an old game on from an old console, it'll still carry over (though my understanding is this is only possible due to having a PC-like architecture across all their consoles, so it's easier to achieve)