I'm going through this as a relatively new PS Vita owner. Sony decided to go with proprietary game cartridges, proprietary memory cards, and DRM'd digital distribution. Despite the quality of the games and hardware, the system didn't do well commercially and it appears Sony has lost interest in the system and it's sibling PS TV/Vita TV.

There are a lot of great games (including PS1 and PSP games) for the system, but once the hardware dies or the download servers are shut down, what is left for people who still want to play these games?

In the back of my mind I've been thinking what digital consumer rights look like. It seems like this point in history has laws that favor publishers more than consumers or the public good.

Players overwhelmingly vote with their wallets in favour of DRM. Just wait until some day Steam servers get shut off, the backlash will be massive.

People don't know any better and don't understand the issues. They're not voting with their wallets. They just want to access the "protected" items. I tend to think most people are just going to accept when they lose access to "protected" items they've already purchased (or just have to re-purchase them). I don't like any of this, but I don't expect it will happen differently either.

I don't know any players that are in favor of DRM per se. Players are willing to accept DRM, IF it is transparent, and even more willing if it enables some perks.

There was a time when DRM was only visible when it broke your legitimately purchased game (e.g. SimCity, Diablo 3)

Now at least gamers are getting some decent perks from DRM (e.g. digital loaning, play anywhere, cross platform licensing) so it's a bit easier to stomach.

> Now at least gamers are getting some decent perks from DRM (e.g. digital loaning, play anywhere, cross platform licensing) so it's a bit easier to stomach.

That's because people have been vocal about that. If the companies had it their way, I'm sure the majority would want you to buy a new license for each platform and system (like how the cheap Windows licenses are - locked to your system)

Yes, I'm sure companies want to maximize sales, that is their job. And yes, people were very vocal about shitty DRM (and rightly so).

The old way of doing business was proprietary everything. (See Sony in the 80s and 90s) I'm just glad manufactures finally saw that locking things down so much increased customer anger and frustration more than it increased sales. Being a child of the 80s, I'm still surprised at stuff like using a generic USB thumb drive in an Xbox 360 and things of that nature.

Maybe not. There are lots of things to consider, such as:

* Windows falls out of popular use for residential people / People moving away from using PCs as we know it.

* Steam client not being available for the mainstream OS of the day.

* Most of the games in your library not working with the the mainstream OS of the day.

* A new platform replaces Steam and it has newer remakes of classic games.

* We are all in our 50-60s and lost access to our accounts long ago because we don't play games anymore.

Steam probably won't be killed off in one day. It will die gradually as it falls into disuse.

Absolutely. The PSP is still my favorite way to go and play the classic PS1 games like FF7, Metal Gear Solid, etc. It really is a wonderful device, but the DRM Sony has repeatedly strengthened over the years has made using it somewhat of a gamble.

It'd be a shame if we suddenly couldn't play these classics anymore just because Sony wants us to repurchase it on Console XYZ.

The PSP has been thoroughly owned, and just about every game for it is available somewhere on the internet. Even emulating the PSP is getting pretty good.

That said, the Vita is much nicer for PS1 games, and if your firmware is old enough, you can even convert your old discs yourself for it.

If you care, dont support Sony. I have stopped buying consoles because of DRM abuse.

It'll be fine, once it's cracked you'll just be able to copy games directly onto it like the PSP Go.

No point cracking it till they stop making games for the thing though.

There's actually a very large collection of Saturn games archives at archive.org. They're MESS compatible CHD files (I wish other emulators would support it, it's a good way to handle large drive copies), but it's a fairly good collection.

I may be wrong, but a quick Google shows a lack of development resources for the CHD format. Either they need to do some SEO, or some straight up marketing.

Maybe a condition of copyright should be that you submit the unrestricted media to Library of Congress, and it gets released upon expiration of copyright.

Nobody would test that version, so it wouldn't work.

Submission of complete source code, on the other hand, could help.

>Submission of complete source code //

But you'd still need to have the build process, so really you'd need submission of the full dev environment. But then you might also need the hardware to run it ...

Personally I think it should be copyright protection or DRM: the demos doesn't get the DRM stuff to enter the public domain so strictly speaking DRM stuff can't be copyright as the deal of time-limited monopoly is broken by the corps that are using DRM.

> "Personally I think it should be copyright protection or DRM"

Yeah, I like that. Sort of like how something can be a trade secret or patented but not both.

Isn't that what the Internet Archive can do? They can host old games under the pretense of them being a "library".