the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
Some lawyers are extremely litigious.
This might be daydreaming and wholly unreasonable, but I think that it should go like this: “As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.”
Can’t afford to patch the game for vulnerabilities in the code or host servers? That’s okay, the community will do that for you after they reverse engineer it.
But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
It costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.
i worked at a place where to get anything done, you had to demonstrate "Business Impact": is what you're about to do going to actually help revenue? if not, move on to something that does
i agree, a suit should only be taken seriously if the company can demonstrate that they are actively losing revenue because of the game preservation effort, otherwise toss it in the bin
why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were making up figures and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.
Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.
These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed.
Even online games like World of Warcraft and its fractal of private servers, people still find value in paying for the unified experience with a unified direction by professionals.
Game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game.
> yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Not all people, especially not if piracy is easy.
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser?
Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games.
But browser games isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play a pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download a pirated game".
Use yandex for this sort of thing
Second that, and we'd get higher quality assets. Game engines could be rewritten/rewired to support ray-tracing and what not. Exciting.