Activision has misplaced its Transformer games, says Hasbro
Toy giant Hasbro wants Activision Blizzard to put its Transformers games back on sale, but the publisher has lost them.…
This is where the argument that piracy is also preserving games stands up. Although, it begs the question why games developers do not properly archive their software.
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Unless there is a financial incentive to do so the costs to archive might be too high unfortunately, especially given the circumstances of the previous merger/acquisitions and licensing, the people responsible for the data were “right” to no longer bare the cost. It’s unlikely there is a physical hard drive of this stuff and even if it was then the hard drive could even have been repurposed or reclaimed. These are businesses at the end of the day and once the product ships, unless they own the IP there’s no reason to keep the data. Hell it could have even been in the contract to delete any Hasbro data after the license expired, and Hasbro never kept a copy themselves.
Culturally, and for the sake of a game library archive pirates are picking up the slack where elsewhere there are non-profit or government bodies responsible for archiving like the National Film Registry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry
It costs penny on the dollar to archive the final code base of these games.
Saying it's fine is like saying a artist shouldn't keep copies of their work on the wall because there's no money it's it.
Companies should have pride in their accomplishments. These companies only care about profitability, and care nothing about what they have done in the past unless it makes them more money. It's why modern gaming feels soulless.
I would personally keep the source code for any game I made, and if I can personally afford that, then these companies can.
Plus you need it in copyright lawsuits to prove someone copied your work.
Yeah. The upside is Microsoft might have incentive in extra stuff to prop up game pass, depending on cost. They will probably want an accounting at some point of all properties that can be accessible to know what they can and can't easily use to put on there, and what can be done with reasonable enough investment.