>The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG

My take on this is that GoG does exactly what I want, let me download offline installers and store them away myself.

Which makes it better at preservation than Steam.

I'm thankful for all the work steam does, including letting you continue to play games that were ripped off the storefront if you own them. I'm just not sure I trust steam in the long term.

On that same note its hard to trust GoG in the long term because they aren't profiting enough off their storefront, hence me keeping all of their offline installers on my own drives after buying a game. (and patch files!)

It gets depressing thinking about how bad we are at game preservation even with all the commercial and hobbyist efforts. I already have too many games piled up with a backlog of "maybe when I get a vacation/retire I can finally get around to these" that won't even be accessible in 30 years.

> The reality is Valve often does a better job at preservation than GoG.

They're solving very different problems: executing old games well that they still have the right to distribute vs reinstating access to games that have left circulation entirely (except perhaps abandonware sites). Neither of these is better or worse than the other.

Not just Steam Input, they maintain SDL and strongly encourage everyone to dynamically link it in order to keep older games going.

Japan has a scheme for orphaned games where if you can prove you did due diligence in searching for a rightsholder and couldn't find one, you can go ahead with rereleasing the game and the royalty payments get held in escrow by the government in case the rightsholder comes forward. I wish the US had something similar for cases like these.

> I wonder how many games are impossible to preserve because of the copyright system and apathy on the part of rights-holders.

Pretty much all of them.

Your Steam licenses are forfeit when you die and your games and account are non-transferable. So when a game stops being sold anymore, which can happen for lots of reasons, there is a finite pool of licenses that becomes zero over time.

As are your GOG, App Store, Play Store and everything else digital purchases.

By the end of this century anything that was sold on Steam will be long-gone. Much, much faster for the App Store since they charge $100/year and oblige updating apps periodically regardless of if they are necessary.

Although in GOG's defense they alone have mentioned a workaround for this status quo.

> “In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable,” GOG spokesperson Zuzanna Rybacka tells Ars. “However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it, taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen.”

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/gog-will-transfer-you...

Ownership is known - Microsoft/Disney/Warner. For them, it's probably not worth the lawyer time to try to sort out what stake and/or transferring the IP.

I think most video games from this era are actually in this state. There are a large number of companies that believe they own the rights to video games like this. No one is really challenging it. In the event that it is challenged they genuinely believe they have the documentation to back it up. But if that were to actually happen, it may come up they have insufficient documentation to support their claims.

It's probably closer to conservation and restoration. One day there won't be any more working 1997 computers, so getting the game to work on a 2025 computer extends the lifespan of the media by at least 28 years. It's not unlike digitizing VHS tapes.

> Just package up the whole thing in an emulator and call it a day.

This is indeed one of the ways GoG ships games, but it doesn't work in all cases.

Not the GoG way.

I remember working at a library field where there was a tremendous amount of concern that digital assets like floppy disks and files would become 'unplayable' over time.

You might not be able to pay people to do it but the video game emulation community shows that it can be done as a labor of love.

Yep, it's like one day we expect an old game to work in VR++ and my 950pi smellovision implant.

If it runs on a runnable emulator of the target platform then we're good.