Got a nice idea on games purchasing..

[FAST6191]

You think the downloadable version would still work after 20 or however many years it takes for the disc to break down to such a point that it no longer works? Games get removed from download services all the time, that's if the service even stays up.

It is always a risk. That said an extant copy being destroyed as part of the new burn, license agreement at the time of sale and all that other jazz would help dodge most of those worries.

 

[Reynardine]

Reading through this thread reminds me that data preservation is a serious problem, one that only becomes more pressing as time moves on. Makes me shudder to think of all the games, source code, assets and also music, movies and whatnot we have already lost to bitrot or ill handled preservation measures.

Even unreleased games, prototypes and things like that waste away because people fail to make proper backups, whatever the reasons.

Heck, even the internet looses things regularly.

I wonder if glass or maybe bacteria as a backup medium is the future?

Sorry if I'm being off topic, this just came to my mind.

 

[SpiffyJUNIOR]

Source code has been lost or never archived for many, many games. FF8 is one that comes to mind.

 

[Kwyjor]

Reading through this thread reminds me that data preservation is a serious problem, one that only becomes more pressing as time moves on. Makes me shudder to think of all the games, source code, assets and also knowledge, music, movies and whatnot we have already lost to bitrot or ill handled preservation measures.

Even unreleased games, prototypes and things like that waste away because people fail to make proper backups, whatever the reasons.

Heck, even the internet looses things regularly.

There are probably lot of things that have been lost not because they were stored on media that rotted away, but because no one could be bothered to properly catalog and index the stuff for later retrieval – which requires both time and space. (The first thing that comes to mind is an add-on for Shadow Warrior discovered years after the game's release because someone found an old CD-R stuck in a drawer.)