Thank you to Robot Cache for sponsoring this video. Download Wasteland 3 for free courtesy of Robot Cache using this link: bit.ly/extrapunctuation

A shoutout to the folks at Good Old Games who are not only preserving old games by selling you a large collection of older titles, but are also 100% DRM free, so you don't need to worry about the possibility that the servers will go down some day.

This is funny how this is coming up now. I may or may not have been looking into how to crack my entire steam library so that I can archive everything onto a personal server someday and have everything be accessible DRM-free. It would be really nice to not lose every game I've been buying for 15 years to any unforeseen circumstance.

"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, teeheehee." There, I added the proper intro.

Petition to have "Yahtzee with sparkly eyes" as a permanent recurring gag.

The Completionist, Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and now Yahtzee each covered game preservation within 24 hours....Good. LRG's is apparently making a new Shantae GBA game....Good. They're also doing Plumbers Don't Wear Ties......Good?

2:03 I hope we get to see more of Yahtzee's "savvy consumer" sprite in the future.

This is why GOG's model (that is, the practice, not the store itself, I'm only slightly shilling for it) must not only be supported, but actively advocated for. It still has the same issue of the distributor deciding to pull merchandise but that applies to any store, physical or digital. GOG gives you the raw game files with zero DRM and it supports numerous older titles going back into the 80s. Preservation of gaming history and true ownership. Objects can be recalled, substances can be pulled, smart devices can be messed with via online updates, but nothing can be done to the full game files sitting in a drive.

This level of conversation is the benefit of being slightly older gamers. There's history, knowledge, and the ability to compare to previous generations of content. I fear our younger gamers, not having this info at hand, are the ones really taking the gaming industry into a more disposable territory. So keep doing this sort of thing - for the kids!

I'm an old man whose shaken his fist at his share of clouds, but I've been banging this drum of decades. I spent countless hours playing Neverwinter Nights on AOL (although the phone company certainly was counting those hours). Needless to say, all my progress in that game is long gone, never to be reclaimed. I swore then that I would never trust a game I couldn't play independently ever again. And now here we are.

It's not really about whether you need internet access or not. It's about the fact that the overwhelming majority of companies requiring it shut down the game after an indeterminate time, destroying the game and effectively robbing you of your purchase. The thing that doesn't get brought up enough is this practice has not been established as legal, despite the industry making billions from it. It's untested by the courts and for games that are sold as goods, depriving the buyer of it all functionality after the point of sale would be flatly illegal in many other industries.

You had me at “It’s time to bang”

"How can you know a movie is good, if you've never seen a bad one?"

Back when steam was a new thing, I was hesitant to start putting money into it for fear of what would happen if the platform ever went away. But then I remembered that games were super easy to pirate so anything lost could be easily gained back for free, which made me more confident in spending money on the platform. Still, I keep installation files of everything I buy from GoG on a physical backup drive just in case we ever find ourselves in some post-internet world where we still have time for video games.

Physical copies are important to me because, as a young kid, there was no greater joy than skipping up to the local pawn chain and flipping through their pre-owned PS2 games, most of which were readily within reach of my pocket money.

4:22 Yatzhee just described my childhood gaming

7:10 the way the old guy walks around has more character than anything I have ever seen from LA Noir

On the topic of remakes replacing the original, something cool that was done with the Atelier Marie Remake was including the original version in the remaked version - more companies should do this IMO if they're not putting them up on other storefronts. Though it failed the "have a physical version" checkbox in the US/EU...

"..making every character look like photos pasted onto spoons." And I lost it right there. 😆

3:15 I so enjoy how often people accidentally recreate Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play without presumably having ever read or seen it

Doubt Yahtzee or any of the Escapist team will see this. But Ross Scott of Freemans Mind/Ross Game Dungeon has been beating the drum on game preservation and online only games for years and I feel he and Yahtzee would do great together in a video talking about the idea. And Ross on a regular basis does talks with others on various subjects. So I think it would help to get the ideas out.

How timely. I was just having a conversation on a motorcycle discord this morning about an ebike company that went under and everyone is scrambling to get new certificates generated so that they will be able to continue using their ebikes after the servers are gone.... It amazes me just how applicable a conversation about video games and digital only release is to a physical frigging bicycle with a motor on it...

"That's why libraries have never driven bookshops out of business". Preach brother...

3:57 This really is the sticking point for me. I love physical media, because every game I buy is a part of my story, and I often go back to replay old games to remember that story, as cheesy as that sounds. When I'm getting too jaded with today's industry, I like to replay old games from my childhood to remind me why I love the medium in the first place.

One of the aspects of ownership people tend to overlook is that one of the legal definitions of ownership is one's right to give away or sell said item. So paying an exorbitant one-off fee for a digital product (which may or may not be in full working order or crash the console but that's a different gripe) that I cannot trade in or sell means that I have "bought" something that I legally do not own.

The Pirate Bay icon ~*chef's kiss*~

This is why I still buy physical copies of console games. I've had enough bad luck with programs like iTunes wiping out my digital collections that I frankly don't trust these companies to keep my purchases safe.

Piracy is basically what preserves gaming history. Even online only games, if they are loved enough, will not go away. Like old MMOs.

Whatever else people may think of piracy, at the very least it can't be argued that it played an i credibly important role in preserving (digital) media of all types.

1:01 for convenience

laughed out loud in the office three times Regardless of Yahtzee's sense of humor which is always on point, he's on point with the rest of this. I buy physical copies of everything I thoroughly enjoy. It's a way to display games I love and it's a way to preserve them. I don't want to have to keep gigantic amounts of space on my hardware via sd cards so I can play whatever I want whenever I want - when I can just pop a cd or a cart in and play it straight away. I'm also as old as Yahtzee and thus remember a time when all we *had* was physical games, and I suppose that is still ingrained in me in some way as well. I don't buy every book I read, but I do buy ones I want to reread at any moment I feel like doing so. I don't buy physical copies of every game I play, but I do buy ones I wanna love some more. And love them I do.

Game companies are somehow consistently managing to push more and more people to piracy. And, hey... I'm not complaining. More seeders for me!

On the PC side I haven't seen a laptop or PC tower that comes with a disc mechanic for a long long time... Maybe physical releases of games should be read-only thumb drives

Thing is, I absolutely love having everything digital and at my fingertips. It's only my distrust of game companies that is preventing me from going full digital

Damn, these are the best arguments I've heard. Granted, I never gave too much thought to to the topic.

Keep banging this drum forever! Its beyond stupid that so much gaming history is being erased in the first place and like you say. I want to be able to still play my favourite titles 20 years down the line in all their original 'glory'

Oh god “under a killing moon”. I nearly forgot about that. Oh man I want to play that now.

I'm glad i'm not the only one who values older media as time capsules of the cultural zeitgeist of their times as well as being timeless art / hilarious shlock / [insert adjective here].Not that everything was better back then (or even now), but such things do deserve to be remembered, be they successful or failurific; aged like fine wine, or like forgotten leftovers. You get the point 👍

I want physical copies so I can lend them to mates when I'm done with them - which is another reason publishers are scrapping them

Just in case Nick reads this: when the sponsor is at the start, I watch/listen through as I get comfortable for the main video. When the sponsor cuts in the middle I skip/skip/skip!

Personally I quite liked the story of L.A. Noire even if it was a bit basic. For me what tanked the game was shoe-horning in GTA gunplay where it always felt forced. It was never fun and it always killed the momentum of the story I felt like. I literally just wanted to drive around, pick up clues, and ask questions, at most the occasional car chase

Yahtzee always takes every opportunity he can to remind us that he didn’t like la noire. Lol.

Piracy can't be stealing if paying for it isn't owning.

It's debatable how much ownership you ever had, as even with physical media you were paying for license to use it rather than actual ownership. I am not sure how exactly movies/TV/books work in comparison, but I assume it's not that far different. The main difference games being software, first and foremost. Of course just like Yahtzee said in video about pirating, there is no actual enforcement of how you can use the license of games you bought - but not because they wouldn't want to but rather because it's impossible. You weren't really supposed to lend them for example. There was various attempts(by EA and I think Microsoft too?) to monetize resold games but I am not sure how that worked law-wise, I assume it wasn't strictly fine by terms and conditions. Game preservation by itself is good and reasonable as it lets you experience past titles and how the medium evolved over time. But due to eventual end of life of physical media ironically digital distribution is better for that. The issue is that there is usually no way to purchase older games. Hard to blame anyone for piracy or emulating when there is no proper, legal way to obtain license to game or buy hardware for it. It's more annoying when companies like Nintendo do their best to put emulators down, while still profiting from them and even selling time-limited digital licenses to their old games. Maybe companies will be eventually forced by law to make previous products easily accessible online, but somehow I doubt that though it'd be the good solution. Then it's debatable how would average gamer even use the preserved, older versions of games. Sure some people might want to revisit a game from their childhood, but most people will just engage with new releases - as it's hard to blame anyone as there is so much media coming out nowadays - and not just games. If you don't earn living by gaming or just gaming most of your (free) time, there's no real way to keep up just with games. This way I wouldn't think of remakes as replacements, because I genuinely doubt a lot of people who appealed RE4R to or maybe even more recent System Shock remake being better example, would go back to revisit those games. I'd say they are just alternative versions or arguably pretty much different things sharing same name and some basic gameplay or story elements. Same way you can have 20 modern military shooters under different names being different titles, despite sharing the same common elements. Though I guess this is just Ship of Theseus argument, in a way. If games were to be considered more stand-alone, then maybe putting them into public domain after 10-20 years would be reasonable and the best solution. Then there are various open-source versions of commercial games built from ground-up by reverse engineering. Which might be good tip in general - if you want freedom of choice in the future, of having options then you should opt for open-source solutions. Replacing Windows with Linux and such.

Remember: It's legal to make an archive copy

Your always online part stirred something in me. I was in the Navy when the idea of always online games where just starting to get floated around. My thought was, "Well, that sucks. I can't play it during deployment". I don't know what internet is like on Naval ships now but back then, you only had 2 hours of internet that didn't block non-work or non-educational sites and imagine the bandwidth of those 2 hours when you and a Carrier full of 4000-5000 other people wanted to get on MySpace (or anything else). Thankfully, the always online thing was only a concept being floated around back then; we spent a lot of downtime playing NHL 2K, Halo, FIFA, and (ironically) Ace Combat.

This is coming hot off the heels of me purchasing a bunch of blu rays of tv shows I can no longer watch on the streaming service that is canceling its own shows to create an artificial loss on its corporate balance sheets to avoid the double whammy of bad sales and taxes that means the c-suite executives don’t get their extra yacht this year. These violent delights have violent ends.

Speaking of remasters I’ve noticed almost every single remaster fucks up the lighting it’s almost impressive how inept so many devs are at not messing up lighting when “improving it”.

Libraries also carry movies, I feel like I always need to say this. I'm sure some libraries carry videogames, but that's kind of complicated, my local library has board games you can take out, which is a lot simpler. There's also a whole Thing with libraries giving digital rentals of ebooks that's complicated and some people exploit the system and the publishers really hate it and fight it at every turn (publishers would definitely kill libraries if they thought they could, just like how game companies really hated and despised game rentals back in the day).

Saw a post recently that said something to the effect of “if purchasing doesn’t mean ownership, piracy doesn’t sound like a crime”

"looking like photos pasted on spoons". Thank you for that 😂

Those who remember the past are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it.

6:23 I went to a Games-focused university (just to do 3d art mind-you), but every designer we kept getting lumped in with would go "I've got this new and innovative idea! It's -insert old game's exact premise here-" One guy said "I've come up with this game where you play a ghost who must solve Rube Golberg-like environment puzzles to achieve a goal!" I said. "That's just Ghost Trick" He said "What's Ghost Trick?" We made a playable version. It was just Ghost Trick.

The comedy in this episode on a super serious topic...Probably the best yet.

Thank you to you tube for waiting to show this video until August 9th. lol.

That was so cool how y'all had Kenneth from 30 Rock on the intro! What a cameo

I've been thinking more and more lately about what's going to happen to steam one day if it decides to trim down it's supported library. I have over a decade of finished, half played, and sometimes untouched games I'd nonetheless like to own forever. I did buy them after all.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that, when games and consoles go out of publication, the owners should be required to hand the binaries and source code and schematics to a public historical preservation agency for permanent archival in the public domain.

We need either laws clarifying what a digital purchase is (rent or actual purchase?) or a law saying that when a service that is part of a product is discontinued, it needs to be handed over to the general public.

Robot cache still has a bit coin miner within their Downloader. While it isn't currently active, they have the ability to turn it on at any time.

Even movies have this issue from time to time! Is it wild that I want to own something that was meaningful to me, and possibly share it with friends and family into the future, even if that studio no longer exists or cares about it!

I can't imagine a more perfect encapsulation of Kojima's insanity than that tweet lol

"Das ist der Stoff" got me real good😂

Our attachement to internet is so absolute that I had a very funny and frustrating interaction today related to it. The short version is I had to call to replace the card on file for my ISP because it was decliend and my internet got turned off. Being one of those weird people with a flip phone and desk top computer I got their phone number off the side of my modem and called to update the card. The phone person spent the first 10 minutes trying to talk me into using their online service to update my payment method. I informed her I couldn't which is why I called. She said, "oh no its super easy you just go to our website.." "I can't" "well if you don't know the address I can email a link to you" "i can't access my email." "the online utility is easier and you don't have to wait on hold on the phone" at which point I had to remind her that I had called because my internet had been turned off, that is why I was on the phone with her in the first place. There was a long pause and she said, I kid you not, "well yes but we could reactivate your internet as soon as we get your payment and it would be faster to make your payment online" at which point i hung up, called back,and thankfully got someone that understood why they would have to take my card over the phone.

Top shelf licker, dude. I could never find some thread for a video game about rediscovering your life through a ghola-style reincarnation element in a Dead Island setting, but reading through Durarara threads changed my life. And there was that sweet moment popping in on D

Oh good we are commenting on the Bloober Team remake

"Oh, Yahtzee, stop grousing!" "NO, YAHTZEE, KEEP GROUSING! YOU'RE RIGHT!"

I loved tex murphy games SO MUCH as a kid. Martian Memorandum looked like crap in some places but used some really innovative tricks in others, plus the Noir in Space esthetic was awesome

It’s interesting that Tex Murphy came up in this episode, I just played and beat that game last week!

4:18 Thanks Yahtzee, I was having lunch.

It's worth noting that if a game is only released digitally, you cannot buy a used copy of it. You will always be subjected to the price on the online store, rather than paying for someone's unwanted disc.

Adobe lost a lawsuit because of the first sale doctrine. Not long after, Adobe replaced their product suite with Creative Cloud. This is not a coincidence.

I know its a small thing but thank you escapist for hearing us out last time about not wanting ads in the middle of the video, if you have to do ads its whatever but thank you for at least putting them in the front and not the middle

Under a killing moon is ooooold man. I forgot it existed.

And that's why I buy on GOG, I actually own those games and can install them on any system regardless of if I lose my account there or not (and I don't need a client).

1:12 Ya'll welcome.

Balan Wonderworld will never be forgotten.

tbh even when you get a physical disc these days, it's generally not going to contain the whole game. First thing that happens when you stick it in the console is it starts downloading the rest of the game and the Day One Patch.

Yahtzee/Ross Scott team collaboration when?

I feel like I never see my biggest grievance with "always-online" gaming brought up: the idea that I can be a grown man with a full-time job, but still have to ask someone for permission before I'm allowed to play my games. It's not the most practical argument, sure, but it REALLY rubs me up the wrong way.

This is why I made GOG my primary store ages ago. People often complain about lack of ownership, but rarely talk about DRM-Free stores. As for the Robot Cache ad, unless you can still sell DELISTED games, that concept is pretty pointless I would argue.

"physical copy" is a red herring. I have DVDs of games I can't play anymore, because they had always-online DRM or were online/multiplayer only to begin with, and all servers were shut down. Meanwhile I can play my digitally distributed GOG collection (or NES ROMs) just fine by copy-pasting it from old hard drive to a new one once in ~5 years.

There's another angle that gets overlooked. I have ADHD, which compromises my object permanence - if I only own things digitally, I forget about them. If they're on a shelf then there's a reminder of their existence sat just behind my desk, and I'm that little bit more likely to actually get round to enjoying them.

Robot Alchemic Drive, aka R.A.D; is a goddamn classic, with voice acting that is just... Perfect. And it deserves to be remembered! Remembered, remastered; re-released, and remade! With Big O/Roger Smith dlc! Because that would be amazing! And it's the perfect game for it! Let us pilot Big O! 😭

Rest in peace Chrome Hounds.

As an anti-remake partisan (there are dozens of us! Dozens!), thank you for also banging the anti-remake drum mid-video.

Thanks for the "Under A Killing Moon" nostalgia! I'm a big Tex Murphy fan. Ever, ever so cheesy.

Game preservation is a hot and valuable topic! Video games are art and we need to ensure that they can be enjoyed down the line, even if that's not going to make the publishers or investors gobs of dough like a hack job remake would

I own a VHS of Star Wars episode 4 where Han shoots first, and Disney can never take that away from me...

Man, I loved those Tex Murphy games.

Well now I want to play Under a Killing Moon

Yahtzee constantly referencing Fantasy World and Treasure Island Dizzy makes me want to play those games out of morbid curiosity.

This is the hill Ross Scott has been standing on and yelling about awkwardly for a while now. The state of game preservation is abysmal, we'll have more actual games from the 80s-90s preserved than from the 2020s if the live service cancer keeps spreading.

Does anyone remember the 2001 Aliens versus Predator 2? Three (great) intertwined campaigns and amazing multiplayer? If you've never heard of it, that might be related to the fact that you can't find it on *any* digital storefront. See, it was made by Monolith but *published* by Sierra (remember them from way back?). While Monolith is still kicking around, Sierra stopped existing over a decade ago. So the rights for the game are...somewhere, maybe languishing in a forgotten filing cabinet. In practical terms, this means the game can no longer be sold and might as well not even exist. It's Lost Media at this point (because of rights issues, mind); if you didn't play it when it came out, you'll never get to.

What sociopath wants a plastic box with a code in it on the shelf. Half the satisfaction of physical disks is displaying, browsing, and meticulously organizing your collection. The other half is the satisfaction of sliding a disk in and the smell of a new plastic case when you open it up for the first time.

Thing is, digital media *should* last forever. A lot longer than the plastic on a disc or the hardware used to run it. The fact that some companies are giving things an artificial lifespan annoys me to no end. So I'm grateful for the people who decompile, who make server emulators, who scan boxart of weird European adventure games that were released in only one country.

"Nothing's stopping you, except laws."

That was perfect

it's not just Always Online either, because I can play Slay the Spire offline, but I can't play it without Steam open, and that's frustrating

With a lot of experience running consoles with generators, they often explode.