Licensing issues with the cars most likely.
Sorry I really made that too ambiguous and left it there because I had to go do something heh. Youâre right about that and it also applies to music and in-game branding.
The thing is that you would figure that MS (and all publishers really) would, over the past decade, create agreements that factor in the fact that itâs a digital product available on an online store where the expectation is that it is timeless. FH1, sure maybe things like buying full fledged retail console games digitally was new then. But then FH2 and more recently FH3âŚitâs a bizarre oversight.
Game preservation from this perspective is an issue that MS will have to deal with even though theyâve been doing well with BC so far.
Xbox should really remove the online requirements for starting a disc game for the first time. They download some configs there for Auto HDR and stuff. Just use defaults if no connection can be established and download a config for all games the next time a connection can be made 
Thats not really preservation IMO. If you have a disc of FH2, you can use it. And you can still buy these. If you have a download licence, this also works. Preservation is Microsoft guaranteeing us, that our games we bought from them with our hard earned cash will still run in 20+ years.
Infinite license timeframes for car and music games are unrealistic. Why would a license holder agree to this? There is no incentive. So its probably expensive as hell.
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[quote=âCallMeCraig, post:43, topic:6956â]
Thats not really preservation IMO. If you have a disc of FH2, you can use it. And you can still buy these. If you have a download licence, this also works. Preservation is Microsoft guaranteeing us, that our games we bought from them with our hard earned cash will still run in 20+ years.
Sure, there may be various definitions of âpreservationâ at play. I see where you are coming from with your definition. One definition that has been discussed a lot in YouTube videos on the topic has to do with the availability of games, a discussion likely spurred by Sony closing their PS3 store.
The discussion was framed around how future retro enthusiasts can experience these games going forward. The conclusion, in more than one discussion, was that piracy was the only way to do it.
Maybe thereâs a better term to describe this aspect. Maybe âgame availabilityâ could be that term. I was using preservation in that context but Iâm open to any term to describe that. The fact that if you owned the PS3 game and you will still be able to download it wasnât seen as the consumer unfriendly part, it was the fact the you couldnât buy a game like Super Stardust HD ever again.
Infinite license timeframes for car and music games are unrealistic. Why would a license holder agree to this? There is no incentive. So its probably expensive as hell.
Donât be so sure about thatâŚI guess thereâs a realization on both sides of these agreements that games, and how theyâre distributed, have changed.
We are just in a transition period now. Soon enough the internet will be utility like electricity and water. Worrying about this will be like saying âWell what if I donât have any electricity? How will I play my games?â
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I hope youâre right, my friend. That said, it doesnât really address the general issue of preservation as I understand it. We could all have our brains connected to the internet and it wouldnât help if Microsoft decided to close down the server that validates Xbox One games or whatever.
Piracy is no solution, its just piracy. What you can do is rip your CDs/DVDs and play them on your PC via emulation. The correct solution would be a time limit after which all games become abandonware. Or every game has to release its source code. ID software had the right idea with Doom and Quake, everybody should have followed them.
I like âgame availabilityâ.
The concern with Sonyâs stuff is just their complete disregard for old games and their closing of servers left and right. Why should anybody trust them?
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Iâve seen piracy brought up in the context of this conversation as the only way to actually get your hands (so to speak) on a game thatâs otherwise completely unavailable legally. In the extremely fictional scenario where I have a child who wants to use my old still-functional PS3 to play a digital-only PS3 game, there is no legal way to procure it, even with all the money in the world.
In that kind of case, the only way the game could be experienced would be an illegal backup. I donât condone piracy, and it sucks that that would be the only avenue by which some things (beyond games, too) could be experienced. I agree that it should be incumbent on the platform holder or whoever to surrender rights and make the games abandonware but I donât see that happening without the US government stepping in and frankly, I have no faith in them to do so in a satisfying way.
Iâm not a lawyer but we could probably even extend this out and have a discussion about copyrights, patents, and IPs. Is it right that loading screen minigames are trademarked by a company and nobody else can use them? Is it fair that Bloodstained is Castlevania with a sticker over the name because Konami is sitting on the IP or just using it for pachislots? That would probably be off-topic though 
Well, iâm not a lawyer. I have no idea what is legal or not in your country and i will not advise anybody on this topic 
Software patents are evil, btw.
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Oh yeah, to be clear, Iâm not telling people to go pirate things or that itâs legal or even moral. Just providing a scenario where itâs the only alternative, which sucks.
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Well we arenât going to be able to save everything. We are going to lose games due to license issues or servers or whatever. People look towards physical games as preservation, but how is it that we play games from the NES and SNES era? Tons of games are simply lost forever from that time while the vast majority anyone will ever play those games today are digitally (ironically). It costs an arm and a leg to get actual working physical copies of those games.
In other news, complaining about preservation and availability works:
Bravo Sony, making the right decision.
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I give it 18 months at most or whenever they think they can get away with it.
Yeah, I understand that, Iâm just explaining what I think is the mindset of the preservationist folks. The ultimate goal for them as I understand it would be to have backups of everything, every 1.1, every alternate release even if itâs a version with a typo or a game-breaking bug. Again, thatâs my uninformed take.
Props to Sony for changing their mind. Thereâs a lot you could ascribe to their intentions but at the end of the day, this is a positive and Iâll always praise a course correction even if it should never have been an issue.
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Iâm assuming this course correction is more a result of some of the bad press more than specifically addressing customer complaints, but either way its nice they are changing their actions a bit.