Where Are They Now…And Where Will They Be Then?

A quick glance at my “Now Playing” sidebar over there on any given week will usually display more older games than newer ones. In that magical stretch of time when I was still living at home but was working my first well-paying full-time job, I amassed literally hundreds of video games. So between those and the steady trickle of games I had accumulated throughout my life prior to that, 99% of which I still have in my posession, the backlog of games I have yet to finish – or even start – is more than enough to keep me plenty busy without needing to have every hot new game as soon as its fresh from the mint. I occasionally make exceptions (see my previous entry), but for the most part, I don’t mind waiting until a game’s price tag sheds a couple of sawbucks before I bring it home. Basically, they aren’t going anywhere. No matter how long I wait, even if it’s a number of years, I’ll still be able to get my hands on that game one way or another, be it used, eBay, or emulator (hypothetically, of course, since I would never do anything illegal). 

Each of the four major home gaming platforms (including PC) have their own respective services that allow you to download smaller titles that probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) make it as full-priced retail releases. While downloading games from the internet used to be reserved for people who wanted yet another version of Ms. Pac-Man, we are now seeing a number of completely new and original titles made by independent developers. In an industry where game development costs have skyrocketed and few AAA publishers can justify spending tens of millions of dollars on anything but safe, guaranteed hits, platforms like WiiWare, XBox Live Arcade, and the PlayStation Store are the place to go for quirky, creative, and unique games at a reasonable price (usually between 5 and 15 bucks).

As someone who reads gaming magazines and listens to gaming podcasts regularly, I constantly hear about all of these fantastic little games and how much people are enjoying them. But something stirred inside me every time I would hear about a downloadable game, and for the longest time I wasn’t exactly sure why. Then it finally hit me: Where would these games be in 5-10 years? Unlike games that have hard-copy versions, will they simply disappear one day? I can click my mouse a few times and have a dozen NES games on their way to my house by morning. But how will I find Braid or PixelJunk Eden or Castle Crashers in 20 years? Are these games just going to be completely gone one day?

If when my PlayStation 2 eventually craps out on me, I’ll still have all of my games there, on my shelf, waiting for a new PS2 to nestle into. Sure, compact discs aren’t made out of diamond and they will eventually rot away, but I’m assuming that as long as I take decent enough care of them they will be playable for most of my lifetime. I bet that I’ll also be able to buy more PS2 games for most of my lifetime. Once a game has been pressed onto a disc, it exists and will always exist provided it’s looked after. But what about games that as of yet only exist in digital form? Even if we optimistically assume that the hardware companies will keep their online game stores persistent over many subsequent hardware generations, they aren’t just going to keep adding games to it and never remove any. XBLA is already beginning the process of removing low-performing games from its service. What happens to those games?

I’m always happy when a previously download-only game comes to retail. One major example is Sam & Max, which was a GameTap-exclusive episodic series that is now seeing its entire first “season” come to the Wii. So now, if GameTap breaks (yeah, I know, just bare with me), those Sam & Max episodes will live on, and people will be able to experience them later even if they don’t have the time or money right now. But that seems to be the exception. For every Sam & Max or Geometry Wars, there’s a dozen other great download-only games that may never exist in hard copy, and may one day be gone forever. And even if you are on the pro side of the emulation argument for the benefit of preserving games, since there is no physical copy for a rom dumper to get their hands on (which I’m sure is much to the delight of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft), there is no way to even keep them alive in that manner. Maybe some hacker will figure out how to get a game off of a PS3 hard drive and turn it into a ROM that is playable elsewhere, but with the way these types of things tend to work, if it hasn’t happened by now it probably never will.

This isn’t just a selfish fear for myself only because I can’t afford to buy every downloadable title I want and won’t be able to wait 5 years and get them all for next to nothing. Honestly, I just worry that there will come a time when nobody will have access to these games anymore, and those who didn’t get a chance to play them within a certain window of opportunity never will. What if people weren’t as able as they are today to go back and rediscover last generation’s gems that most people missed at the time, like Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, and Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath (all of which are easily findable and for really cheap)? Because mark my words, the games that we’re going to be talking about in the future the way we talk about those now are going to be the downloadable games, only they won’t be an eBay search away. I certainly shudder at the thought of a gaming future where there are games we look back at and say “Too bad I never got to play that, because now I can’t. Ever.”