A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.
“For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation has been supporting with the Software Preservation Network (SPN) on a petition to allow libraries and archives to remotely share digital access to out-of-print video games in their collections,” VGHF explains in its statement. “Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers.”
Essentially, this exemption would open up the possibility of a digital library where historians and researchers could ‘check out’ digital games that run through emulators. The VGHF argues that around 87% of all video games released in the US before 2010 are now out of print, and the only legal way to access those games now is through the occasionally exorbitant prices and often failing hardware that defines the retro gaming market.
When they kill the games, they no longer make money on them. So playing without paying is not a lost sale, even if the player is corrupt enough to enjoy playing. So there’s no problem yeah?
This reeks of selling games on a “pay per new game save” kind of move. If “replay” is a threat, how long until they move to eliminate that?
Why play old fun games, when you could subscribe to the latest bland live service FOMO skinner box masquerading as a game?
I don’t know where this industry is headed but it isn’t to a good place.