Reliance on servers controlled entirely by the developer is the biggest enemy of video game conservation by far.

Digital games can be pirated. DRM that runs on the client can be fooled or bypassed with enough effort. Storage is becoming cheaper as time goes by. Time is generally not critical for any of these.

Unlike all of these things, reliance on servers has no real solution and is a guaranteed ticking timebomb. Many games released today (manly "live service" games) have no offline mode and simply cannot fully function offline even if they're reverse-engineered and modified to do so, because a significant part of the game logic code and data is simply not present on the client. Often the only real hope is attempting to reverse-engineer the server logic and capture relevant data via packet sniffing so custom server software can be developed that emulates the behavior of the official servers accurately enough to allow the game to be played, but games nowadays are becoming so complex and game logic is becoming so intertwined with the servers that this is simply not a feasible task unless you have direct access to the server data somehow.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that has largely not manifested yet, so most people don't yet realize it's a problem. Live service games only started becoming the norm in the last decade, and the vast majority of the popular ones are still in operation. In a decade or two, most live service games people love today will no longer be playable due to the servers being shut down, and developers have no financial incentive to allow them to be playable after that. Will a solution be found before then? Probably not. I'm not looking forward to it.

A good solution would be to legislate. Mandate by law that after a certain period of time (starting from the point on which the servers get shut down) the developer has to supply the corresponding server source code.

Why would that even make it anywhere, to be honest? The relevant lobbyists have a vested interest in having those games go away - they only like retrogaming insofar as they can make money from it. They'd much rather people be playing versions of games that they have remastered or rereleased, than the original copies that exist (and that they make no money from if one acquires them secondhand). Many major studio heads have spoken, openly, about their disdain for the secondhand market's mere existence.

No, the actual way forward for large scale preservation requires donning a pirate's hat. The people really doing legitimate preservation work are largely doing it outside of the purview of the copyright holders (and often in direct opposition to the rightsholders' desires). This has always been the case and will continue to be the case as long as copyright remains in force in the current form.

For a lot of games, it won’t really matter anyway. The game is the multi player experience. If the users are gone, a core part of the game is missing regardless of if it’s possible to run anymore.

However, if the game is possible to run, that creates the opportunity for there to be new fans of the game. If you can't run the game at all, there's zero chance that can ever happen.

Preserving the games themselves, including server components or emulators, is key to this. As it stands, it already requires there be someone with the personal interest in a specific game, and the technical ability to crack it. Without that, such a game won't be preserved no matter what. Requiring publishers to make such things available at some point can only help. It removes or mitigates that later requirement.

> purposefully bloated games to hundreds of gigabytes so that they are harder to pirate

This is an unfair claim. Games aren't purposefully bloated so they are harder to pirate. 4k textures are 16 times larger than 1k textures, so even with large amounts of compression, just the switch to 4k textures will likely make games 10x larger than they were. Games nowadays come with localised audio which is often uncompressed because storage has gotten larger, cheaper and faster, and it drastically reduces the cpu overhead of audio playback which can be a significant chunk of time and is a very noticeable issue when it stutters.

Games also have significantly more content than they had in the earlier days because people demand it. Starfox (a game mentioned in the article) has a "completionist" time [0] of 5 hours - compre that to a game like Monster Hunter Rise (I used this as an example as I'm playing it right now), that has a main story play time of 15 hours [1].

[0] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=9035 [1] https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=83169

Star fox and Monster Hunter are different kinds of games. RPGs and dungeon crawlers have asked for dozens of hours of grinding for a very long time.

However, it is much more pleasurable and less of a grind when fighting monsters made up of a million 3D triangles as opposed to one made up of 100 2D squares.

Often times designers copy the same resource many times to build a level/game. Maybe they modify the resource a little bit, but it's still mostly a copy. There is no deduplication, the n copies get stored n times. Admittedly, it's also done to improve load times, but making piracy harder is I think another benefit for the game creators.

This was supposedly done to improve loads on hard drives by keeping resources physically close.

I seem to remember that some old program was in fact purposefully bloated (by including a copy of ... something(?) encrypted with a random key, i.e. essentially a chunk random data, on the installation CD) to make it harder to transfer via the slow connections of the time.

(I wanted to make a snarky irrelevant note but now I want to remember what it was.)

I don't believe the intention was padding the size, given the main shipping format was disks rather than downloads, but perhaps you're thinking of this?

https://kotaku.com/when-south-park-got-an-ea-sports-game-pul...

No, and probably not this either (which cites both piracy and padding to the higher-bandwidth edge of the CD).

https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/08/13/crash-bandicoot...

Give it some time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32789120

What I think it's harder to preserve is the fact that modern games are often constantly updated with new content to the point that sometimes not much of the original experience remains. For example Terraria 1.0 is wildy different from 1.4 released almost 10 years later and this can be said of most modern titles, especially ones that were released in early access. Not to talk about online games, titles like Fortnite, Warframe, Destiny to name a few are all constantly evolving with new content releases that alter basically everything. Good luck preserving and replaying some specific updates if you ever feel nostalgic about it.

Same thing with mobile games, they’re constantly adapting to trends or doing seasonal updates. I feel like this is overlooked because “serious” gamers don’t care about mobile games, but one day people are going to be nostalgic for the Halloween 2014 update of candy crush.

I think for these, the most we will be able to preserve is things like "let's plays" or streams to see what it was like at that point in time.

League of Legends is one such game as well.

Steam is a double-edged sword. I have access to 15 year old games on all of my computers today. This would be a challenge for a game distributed on a disk with DRM. However, my 1000+ USD library could vanish with one internet outage, if steam goes bankrupt, if steam makes legal missteps, if steam decides they don't like me, etc.

I de-googled to avoid being at the mercy of a for-profit company for more important identity-related matters, but it'd be a sad day if I ever lost access to the archive of games.

Steam has relatively weak DRM. There is nothing that prevents pirates from building an archive.

The only real threat is fragmentation of game stores so that you cannot get all games on a single store.

It doesn't. Accused Farms makes some videos about the subject, trying to document some games before they vanish. Dead Game News.

https://www.youtube.com/user/chilledsanity/videos

Quality content all around to be honest, though my favorite is still Freeman's Mind, even if that is a bit off-topic...

Additionally games at this point are effectively incomplete and "Day One Patches" are leveraged to get extra time to fix bugs.

Now mostly this is leveraged to finish up the online features (ie. pvp), as one obviously can't play online without connecting to the net, and then that's an opportunity to download a patch. However, these patches do have other fixes and surely there are some companies that are leveraging this significantly more than others for general fixes that have nothing to do with online features.

At least some of those aspects are only temporary, if they are an issue at all: Already in the 90s we had 10MB games that were shipped on a CD with the rest of the CD being filled with the game soundtrack as CD Audio. Pirating the whole game including the soundtrack was unrealistic for most people back then, but these days you'd laugh at the size. The same will be true for this generation's "huge" games in just a few years. The real obstacle to preservation are the DRM schemes you mentioned.