Video Games Preservation

[nurjahanbibi]

Hi @ultrayoba! Even though your post is from a few years ago, the topic of video game preservation remains relevant and important. Your insights into running old games on modern machines and the valuable links you've provided are still incredibly useful to gamers and preservation enthusiasts.
Preserving our gaming history is like holding onto a piece of our past, and it's heartening to see your dedication to keeping these classic games alive.
By the way, speaking of preserving gaming experiences, have you ever explored CS2 skins in games like Counter-Strike? They're a way to add a personal touch to your in-game weapons and enhance your gaming experience.

Edited November 23, 2023 by nurjahanbibi (see edit history)

[yuriythebest]

Hi all! I wanted to chime in on an aspect of this that's often overlooked: mobile games. And also rant a bit.

I'm a developer of android/iOS games and have released dozens of games. What takes up a lot of my time now is keeping the games "in compliance" or else they will face removal from google play/the apple store.  Especially with google play, every few years you need to update your games for the new google API and make other compliance changes OR they will remove the game. Updating may "seem" easy as in "oh, just update to the new unity version and republish" but with dozens of games, they often have their specific issues and with each need to update something new gets broken and needs to be fixed. I think, the reason many games disappear is because people often have outside developers do the work and then don't bother updating or the source code just gets lost. I also think it's insane that you can buy a phone, and even if it will work in 10 years on a technical level, it will be "out of date" and you wouldn't be able to use recent apps - people often mention 'security', but if that were the case shouldn't I be able to click "accept the risks" or something like that? 

I dare you to find one person who can explain without vague terms like "more modern" , "security"  why phones have this thing where the version of OS increases and eventually older ones stop getting new apps. I personally think it's all a scam - for example, I'm using an operating system (starts with a "w" and the version is 10), where I disabled all the updates and tracking , and just use a 3rd party firewall and antivirus, and haven't had any issue in years. The only reason I had to update from 7 is because unity3d stopped supporting it.

This is all especially insane considering that for almost all of the 200,000 years of human existence, the biggest change would be that once every few thousand years there would be a slightly better flinthead shape developed. Like, what would the ancient babylonians think of us where we have this "machine of the gods" but oh, 10 years passed and it's "too old"

Edited February 18 by yuriythebest (see edit history)

[kerdios]

@yuriythebest this is even worse now that valve has decided to deprecate all of its steam apps from win8 and older systems. At least there's still gog to work off of for that. Are there any mobile app repositories for old systems, and if not, why?

[nazaretto]

 

Unfortunately, you're right, the situation for older operating systems like Windows 8 and below is not ideal for accessing modern apps.