Why are video game companies so bad at preserving source code? It happens in America and Japan

Why are video game companies so bad at preserving source code? It happens in America and Japan.

Attached: A lot of company logos.png (1500x1000, 185.28K)

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/tiq0OL8rzso?t=2697
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Embarassment.

Why bother? It's not going to enter the public domain for over a hundred years, so it's not like anyone alive today is every going to get to see it.

You can use it to keep the game alive on modern systems and who knows, devs might not be greedy enough to actually release it to the public under a GPL license or something.

Not him. I prefer the MIT license or even the zlib license.

typically, employees only stay with a company like that for one or two projects
the final compile is performed at one desk and anything in their records probably gets chucked on their way out

>keep the game alive on modern systems
Why bother? 95% of sales are within the first year.

And then 10 years later you suddenly have a market to sell the game to those same people again

Git became a thing in 2005. Github became a thing in 2008. These two brought a new standard of keeping the code alive to a lot of companies. Everyone shudders at the thought of CVS on bare metal.

Because the industry isn't old enough to have realized that preserving the history of your medium is Kind Of Fucking Important.

I'm pretty sure in the early days of film no one preserved jack shit and a whole lot of stuff was lost.

They can go buy the old console too.

Nintendo's old NES games still keeps selling, and not everything has to be about money anyway.

>Volition
>bad at preserving source code
well they gave the Freespace source code to the community for free

Or, developers re-release the game and open a new revenue stream. Did you completely miss the entire history of games, where nearly everyone has done this?

There are several evergreen titles.

Electronic Arts had source code from fucking 1983 and wasn't the code for Doom released in 1997?

it was early days that was bad.

any game made after 2000 has source code held in some kind of version control system aka GIT,SVN etc

>Create arguably the best horror game ever made
>Lose source code to said horror game
>Come the early 2010s and HD collections of PS2 game trilogies/duologies are all the rage
>Get a Wii shovelware developer to MacGyver an HD collection of the two best games in the Silent Hill franchise
>Act surprised when the shovelware developers fuck it up
>tfw Silent Hill 2 got this treatment in spite of its acclaim and general legendary status cuz Konami is incompetent

Attached: bitch.png (258x360, 84.76K)

It's not open source, tho.

source code itself doesnt mean much when you dont have assets

>Now Zig Forums is in favor of a new version of Skyrim every year

>Lose source code to said horror game
They had lost the gold source code, but they had beta source code.
The distinction is important because I think the reason they didn't included the OG Silent Hill is because they have lost everything for it.

But have you seen the Freespace Source Code Project? It would not have been possible for the guys behind it to make it without access to the source code and the games engine.

Do you still have the essays you wrote in 5th grade?

Yes, because that totally makes Konami look less incompetent in regards to their handling of the series that had the potential to be THE Resident Evil killer.

Attached: you dumb fuck.png (2103x1665, 1.2M)

No, but my point is that it makes financial sense to preserve source code.

In the early days of video games when a lot more hardware work had to be done, it meant keeping around lots of old cartridges and other hardware pieces, and that stuff is easy to lose track of if you're not careful. And many companies weren't super careful early on, because they didn't have the mindset that these games they were working on 30 or so years ago would be cherished memories later. Stuff gets lost, people don't bother to save iterations of the game, just master copies or revised masters.

Probably something about the relationship between publisher and developer.

Developers need to hand out the code to the publisher and the publisher doesn't know much about preserving what they didn't make. etc.

For example I work in the film business and post production companies after a project is done handle everything to the owner, terabytes of content that the post production house deletes because the owner of the material now has, and who wants to store all that shit for free. But then the owner doesn't take care of it and it gets lost.

>code for Doom

Yeah but ID Software had something very specific going on, they were commited to release source code because they wanted to help the community, they were probably the only big company back then doing that.

Fair enough. It would glorious to play Blade Runner with the original HD assets.

Attached: bladerunner73.jpg (1440x1080, 1.24M)

Yeah most of silent films are lost, including Melies films, the dude sold his films to a company that turned them into shoe heels.

You really believe they don't preserve it? That's just a convenient lie for the continuity of the agenda.

I'll never get over the comic sans sign. Shit's just too good.

Did Volition release that SR2 update yet? I want my multiplayer.

>I asked EA if I can release the source code to SimCity for the Apple IIGS, and they basically gave me a big fat, red blinking light NO.
youtu.be/tiq0OL8rzso?t=2697
For what reason? They don't sell the original SimCity anywhere and the Unix version was already open sourced in 2008.

>For example I work in the film business and post production companies after a project is done handle everything to the owner, terabytes of content that the post production house deletes because the owner of the material now has, and who wants to store all that shit for free. But then the owner doesn't take care of it and it gets lost.
Doesn't the film and television industry now have a standard preservation rule or does that not matter except for things that are in danger of being lost?

Nintendo preserves everything, even stuff from other companies. It's why those Pokemon source code leaks happened, the code was still on their servers.

I dont understand how you lose source code. Is it on a disc somewhere lost?