Man, we’d really be screwed without piracy and emulators. This number only counts legal availability.
Legitimately, right?
Or are 87% of classic games not able to be found even as ROMs through piracy? 🤔
I mean, there’s a lot of other media that is the same… Like books unavailable to be purchased, but out there at a library or as a PDF online somewhere.
Commercial availability specifically. Thanks to archivers and the such, there are usually options to play most things. While I personally don’t care about commercially buying most of these classics, I do find it odd how little ip owners seem to want to make some of these older titles available
Well most of the comments here don’t have an insight into this. The reason they don’t re-release video games or old movies is because they don’t want you enjoying old things. It’s capitalism, but it’s not arbitrary like the scarcity. Because it’s not just video games, no company wants to re-release anything. Not a tractor, not a movie, not a dishwasher, nothing.
Why? Because then you don’t buy the new thing with higher margins. Then you don’t watch the new movie and they can’t sell the new ads with the new character designs promoting it. Or you don’t get locked in to their new cartridge system. Or subscription plan. Whatever. The song is different, the story is the same, new stuff make line go up faster. With tons of waste involved as well.
The reason they don’t re-release video games or old movies is because they don’t want you enjoying old things.
You’re assuming nefarious intent. I suspect the reality is that it’s not worth the rights holders’ time or money to invest in re-releasing old titles that very few people would buy.
Yeah, im going with this one. Even if it takes a company a total of 5 hours work to wrap an old game in an emulator and release it on steam, it’s not going to be worth it when only 5 people buy it.
Cloanto, the company that owns the rights to the Commodore Amiga line, have a legal emulator that they sell called Amiga Forever. It’s about half the price of one modern AAA game, and when you download it, it comes with about fifty games of varying notability, and there’s many times more you can just install and play. And it’s all legal.
I would love this to be the industry norm, imagine being able to download a NES! It’s annoying that if we want future generations to be able to experience games of the past (whether to learn from them, or just for pleasure) we need to teach our children about piracy.
