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Why do you pay for abandonware?

Narushima

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(Thread split from the GOG one)

Fuck yeah, finally!
I still don't understand this.
The game was always available. They just stuck a price sticker on it.
And I don't buy the excuse that it's tough to run. You're willing to play an old strategy game, but not set up a virtual machine?
 
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It's finally as in "finally I can just click install and play" and not "finally I can play this previously unavailable game". People pay for convenience.

(the deal begins to make less sense when the port quality is shit and you still have to jump through hoops, sure)
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Fuck yeah, finally!
I still don't understand this.
The game was always available. They just stuck a price sticker on it.
And I don't buy the excuse that it's tough to run. You're willing to play an old strategy game, but not set up a virtual machine?
You can pirate vast majority of games in existence at pretty much any point in history, as of now including PG's gog installer. What is the point you are trying to make and what are you trying so hard to understand? Logged onto gog's front page and saw too few anime tiddies or something?
 

Narushima

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You can pirate vast majority of games in existence at pretty much any point in history
I'm not talking about pirating. This is abandonware. It's not like the original creators see any of the money you give GOG.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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...and? If you didn't give money to the devs when they were still alive and are poor don't want to support polish occupation of cyprus, then just download a copy like you always can (be quick, lest they run out) and stop wasting my time and bandwidth.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I'm not talking about pirating. This is abandonware.

Abandonware is still pirating but even if it wasn't, the term generally refers to software that isn't available for sale anymore in any official capacity. By definition, a game being available for sale on GOG by their current IP owners is not abandonware anymore.

It's not like the original creators see any of the money you give GOG.

For many games the original creators wouldn't see any money out of the sales even when it was brand new because a lot of them were made in a contract basis for the publisher where the publisher paid up front the developer some amount of money to make the game. This is why, for example, Blood 2 was so buggy - Monolith wanted to release patches for it but GT Interactive didn't hire them for that and as Monolith wouldn't have any additional income from the game's sales (all went to GT) they couldn't do any unpaid work on it and had to move on to other projects.
 

Narushima

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Abandonware is still pirating but even if it wasn't, the term generally refers to software that isn't available for sale anymore in any official capacity.
Sure, but what I meant is that you don't have to wait for a game to be sold to play it. So to me there's not real reason to say "finally!", since the option to play the game was always there. If you cared that much, you would have played it already.

I hate Virtual Machines
I said virtual machine, but that's not always necessary. I've seen instructions to run People's General natively on Windows 10, for isntance.
 
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Comte_II

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So I got peoples general and those faggots took 2 days to make a offline installer. I wonder if this is a taste of the future? Anyway started backing up the stuff I want now cause I don't trust these globohomos.
 

Taluntain

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Abandonware is still pirating
Is this actually legally true? How can you steal something that no one is charging for in the first place?

There is no legal distinction between "abandonware" and pirated games, they're one and the same. The only distinction is semantics. Just because something isn't available for sale at the moment doesn't give anyone the legal right to freely distribute or copy it. In any case, as mentioned, any software stops being "abandonware" the second it becomes legally available for sale anywhere. When GOG drags out old games from oblivion and offers them for sale on their site, they've done all the manual labour required to sort out all the legal rights beforehand. As they've written on a number of occasions, sorting out all the rights and permissions spanning back decades for IPs which could have been sold and resold a number of times over the years is often a much larger undertaking than merely patching up the games and making them available for purchase.
 

Humbaba

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There is no legal distinction between "abandonware" and pirated games, they're one and the same. The only distinction is semantics. Just because something isn't available for sale at the moment doesn't give anyone the legal right to freely distribute or copy it.

But what about games where no one even knows who owns the IP? Where's the issue when nobody can lay claim to what has allegedly been stolen? Does that just not matter?
 

octavius

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But what about games where no one even knows who owns the IP? Where's the issue when nobody can lay claim to what has allegedly been stolen? Does that just not matter?

It's basic quantum mechanics.
One can't know the owner before one sells it. By selling it the wave function collapses, producing a shoal of corporate lawyers.
 

Taluntain

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There is no legal distinction between "abandonware" and pirated games, they're one and the same. The only distinction is semantics. Just because something isn't available for sale at the moment doesn't give anyone the legal right to freely distribute or copy it.

But what about games where no one even knows who owns the IP? Where's the issue when nobody can lay claim to what has allegedly been stolen? Does that just not matter?

Those cases are really rare, but sure, they still happen. If you're looking for an excuse to pirate a game, that one's probably as good as it gets. Whether it's an issue for you or not is up to you. I'm just saying that what's actually legal vs. what people perceive to be legal are sometimes two different things. There are cases where the IP owners intentionally don't want certain old software to be available any more (e.g. the Dune games). From my POV that's a counter-productive position to take, but legally as the owners they have the right not to make certain software available for sale again if they so choose.
 

Humbaba

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Those cases are really rare, but sure, they still happen. If you're looking for an excuse to pirate a game, that one's probably as good as it gets. Whether it's an issue for you or not is up to you. I'm just saying that what's actually legal vs. what people perceive to be legal are sometimes two different things. There are cases where the IP owners intentionally don't want certain old software to be available any more (e.g. the Dune games). From my POV that's a counter-productive position to take, but legally as the owners they have the right not to make certain software available for sale again if they so choose.

Uh oh lads, if I add the abandonware to my theoretical prison sentence for piracy, I'll be going away for 214 years. :shredder:
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
You need to pay $30 for a 40 year old game to a company full of people who were at best in diapers when the game is made. $0 of that $30 goes to people who actually made the games, because none of them work at the company you're giving the money to. The money will be used to fund games you hate created by people who hate you.
Or else... YOU'RE BREAKING THE LAW!!!!

People will actually defend this.

And if you can provide proof that the money actually goes to the original developers, I'd be more than happy to pay for the games.
 
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Taluntain

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You need to pay $30 for a 40 year old game to a company full of people who were at best in diapers when the game is made. $0 of that $30 goes to people who actually made the games, because none of them work at the company you're giving the money to. The money will be used to fund games you hate created by people who hate you.
Or else... YOU'RE BREAKING THE LAW!!!!

People will actually defend this.

And if you can provide proof that the money actually goes to the original developers, I'd be more than happy to pay for the games.

If only we were required to pay for things merely to those people or companies who "deserve the money", based on our subjective take. That's not how the law works. But naturally, people have always come up with all kinds of excuses and justifications for pirating games, so "the original developers aren't getting my money now" is really just as good a justification as "I hate EA, so I'm going to pirate all their games". If you want to be taken seriously, you have the option of boycotting a company's products by not buying them and avoiding them completely. Now that would actually stand for something.
 

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