[chias]

Not to mention:

1. World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

2. What even is the definition of a "video game"? Is Neopets a video game? Is Twitter?

[acdha]

I’d like a proposal which simply starts by saying that they have to use terms like “rent” or “subscribe” for anything which uses DRM or company servers, and expand from there since it definitely gets thorny fast on both fronts. (What do you do with a Facebook game when they break an API a decade later?)

For things like Warcraft, I think that absolutely should be preserved for historians and other researchers if nothing else but it’s hard to imagine that being possible without some kind of active cooperation. I wonder whether there’d be an angle where you could get some kind of tax credit by depositing playable offline copies with a national library but simply the storage costs would be a burden there.

[account42]

> I wonder whether there’d be an angle where you could get some kind of tax credit by depositing playable offline copies with a national library but simply the storage costs would be a burden there.

It should simply be a requirement for copyright protection in the first place - if it doesn't actually end up in the commons after the copyright term the deal makes no sense for society overall.

[henriquecm8]

> 1. World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

I think it's more about the right of the consumer to be able to play what they paid for than keep the original version intact.

[thaumasiotes]

The right to play World of Warcraft by yourself is worthless. The content available to a single player isn't even supposed to be fun.

You'd need the right to run a full server that your friends can also connect to.

[nerdjon]

> World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

Well one of the links that was provided to me in the last discussion list the original version of FF14 (before reborn) as "dead" even though FF14 is still a thing (yes I know it was majorly changed given the original issues). So I am guessing there are at least some people that are going to try to make the argument that every version needs to be preserved.

I think that is taking things too far, but given it is listed on that page, some do think that.

[account42]

> I think that is taking things too far

Why?