Abandoned Games

[Mr Flibble]

Folks I know this is my first foray into the 3D Gamer board but I wanted to come in and see if I could point some of your gaming community towards a Petition which hopes to draw attention to the Abandonware issue, and maybe get the publishers to loosen their grip on copyright held on classic games of yester year.

An article here explains the thought behind the petition

http://www.exiled-gamers.co.uk/articles/abandonware/

and the petition itself is held here

http://www.petitiononline.com/oldgame/petition.html

Some people may think that old games aren't worth the trouble, they won't have the cutting edge graphics of modern games and may be difficult to get running. However the key to this is we'd like you to get a chance to see these games. To download them legally and get to see for yourself why they're considered classics. But unless the publishers release their death-grip on the copyright of games they never plan to publish again, you'll never get to make that decision yourself.

So do us both a favour. Read the article and if it makes sense to you sign the petition.

Could people also spread this around please.......the more people it reaches the larger the petition and the more chance it will have some effect.

Cheers

[Mara]

Good idea. There are a number of older games I'd like to try out if they were playable on todays computers and were available for purchase.

:read:

[Shoboy]

Thing is, the reason why publishers hold on to the copyrights of some games is because of possible sequels. EA holds SystemShock2, but they wont make SS3. WHy not release SS2? Because in this case, they would then be relinguishing the rights to the entire name. Any future game on this franchise would/could not be made unless they re-bought the copyright. And once it's out there, that is hard and costly to do.

Not every game is like this, but ALOT are. By giving up the rights to a specific game, they could well enough be giving up the ENTIRE name/franchise and thus loose money if the market changed to were a sequel was viable. And paying the "re-up" to keep the copyright is usually not very expensive anyway, so it's "usually" not a money loser to keep a game name they may never use...........

[DanTheManPR]

A lot of companies have made they're old games freeware - even ones that still want the rights to it (Freespace 2 comes to mind).