Be the change you want to see. Make some games worth playing and release it as a FOSS and prove it can be a commercial success as well. See how it goes.

Asking people to release their work for free while providing very little incentives other than your own benefit aren't going to convince people who need to put food on the table NOW, without relying on miniscule probability of popularity or success after pouring years of your time.

The open sourcing of the quake engine is where a lot of modern engines got their roots.

The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that's another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren't built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren't built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there's no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won't be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there's no guarantee that you'll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There's already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I'd bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It's kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

Why would we need open source instead of just removing drm?

Most people aren't going to compile old games for new hardware. That's not an easy task.

Abandonware is a thing, and there are some websites dedicated to it. GOG has done some great stuff releasing drm free games. So long as we have drm free, we can always build emulators to run what can't natively run on modern systems.

I’m not against it, but it’s not a silver bullet for game preservation. All game engines are unique. Some are heavily optimized for their target hardware. Just because you have access to original source code doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy to preserve it for future hardware.

I mean, there are games that got terrible ports despite dedicated teams working on it full time with access to original source code. It won’t be much easier for the fans taking this on as a hobby project during their evenings.

Only the games with most dedicated fans will get preserved for future generations.

It’s an interesting article and I’m also starting to think more and more about game preservation.

I don’t understand why a company like Sony wouldn’t provide you a way to play ps1-3 games on your ps5. I would even be ready to pay for it.

There might be some technical problems I’m not seeing, but people can do it on older pc’s..

I guess the whole video game industry has to think about preserving its own history.

I don’t know if open sourcing games would help, but something needs to be done.

Even playing a game like Sim City 2000 on pc is proving challenging now on Windows. I would want to play it on Linux but I can’t imagine how difficult that would be as the game isn’t even listed in Proton DB. And the VM solution would probably not work as Steam wouldn’t support something like Windows XP…

What do you guys think about releasing them on github for free but in official stores as paid?

I really enjoyed "Veloren"

Descent, Freespace 2, these two games open sourced a long time ago. They've been updated by the community over the years, and ascended far beyond where they started.

I'm all for it. Glider Pro for MacOS 9 and below released its code in a sort of "as is" state a few years ago, and thankfully, some skilled devs took it up and ported it to modern systems.

It's a game I would have sorely missed, having long since left the Apple ecosystem (and that game was also PPC-only). We'll still lose even open source games, but at least people would then have the option to preserve them.

I think it could be viable for a company to release a game with a "5 year FOSS promise" or something similar, but you have to realize that the gaming community would never adequately financially support most development endeavors if the choice was as easy as downloading it from place A vs place B.

I didn't know about thrive. That game looks cool! Mindustry is a lot of fun! I am not a gamer but that game is really cool. And KGoldrunner is a classics

Devil's Advocate:

FOSS is basically an endless development cycle. Anyone who wants to pick up and keep developing can. This has benefits and drawbacks.

I would say the main drawback is that you might be expected to work longer on this code than you plan to. The gaming community can be pretty demanding while also not stepping up to contribute themselves.

Further, it means some games can end up in unintentional "development hell" because there really isn't an end-state for the game. The nature of the game keeps changing because the person in charge can't decide what they want to go with long-term. The Duke Nukem Forever problem.

Now, indie titles like Terraria and Stardew Valley stand as examples that show an eternal development can be a good thing, but they're truly in the minority and they're really both driven by auteurs, which is why the themes are so crisp and well placed throughout the games. It's kind of hard to have a single brilliant auteur in charge of a giant game involving lots of people and have it work out. Look at the shitshow of an aftermath of what happened to the auteurs behind Disco Elysium. When you're part of a big team, some things always become a shadow of their original intent. Things become anodyne not on purpose, but simply because not everyone is on the same page. Designing a horse by committee results in a camel, etc.

It could work for small indie games, I don't think it would work for anything AAA-level.

I agree