[i1856511]

Yes, those things cost money, but the money that we want to make, we want to make it today. And this is how we make it. What economic incentive is there for preservation?

(/takes off devil's advocate hat and puts on flame suit)

[slg]

What economic incentive is there for art museums? Maybe society shouldn't be designed primarily around economic incentives.

[RajT88]

Nintendo has shown the way, for better or worse.

Tightly managed first party IP with a lot of retro throwback games/compilations/crossovers/virtual console and an overly aggressive copyright approach to managing what people do with their IP (even if fair use).

Nintendo plays the long game. They do not compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and the like.

[TheGRS]

The win/win scenario I think is recognizing there is a market for the preserved titles and putting the effort in to capture that market. There's effort involved in emulating old games to work on modern hardware.

But yes I think you're on to something that Nintendo plays the long game the best, they handle their IPs like Disney does: featuring them across multiple verticals that feed into each other. Its surprising to me how long its taken Nintendo to come back to movies and TV.

Actually now that I think about it, Disney's biggest shortcoming is their video game division despite many wonderful retro Disney and Lucasarts games at their disposal.

[RajT88]

Do not get me started on Lucasarts. I would watch the shit out of a Monkey Island show or film.

[madrox]

Especially when you have a passionate community willing to work for free to preserve things, am I right?

[wtetzner]

The economic incentives will only come when enough people stop buying these kinds of games. Whether or not that will ever happen remains to be seen.

[j1elo]

Videogame preservation is on par with other media conservation, like literature; something that's an overall good for humanity as a whole, but not in the mind of the majority of consumers of such media. And that's perfectly OK. Most people just want to consume and forget.

Conservation is a social interest amd must come from organized initiatives, it will never take shape magically from individual judgement.