Do you think that video games will be still known when they will enter the public domain (copyrights expiring)?
Texts will have been written about them, e.g. wiki articles or fediverse posts will probably survive, but playable is another story.
Even if they are known, will they still be playable?
Fairly certain doom will still work.
Looking at the state of the new Fifa and other sports games: No, no they won’t be playable unless someone reverse engineers EA’s servers.
CodeMaster religiously hold onto their copyrights. I remember searching for their 8bit games of the 1980s and while copies are out there, the places that do it legally, World of Spectrum for example, don’t host them because CodeMasters refuse permission for these old games to be distributed for free.
Under current copyright law in the USA, we’re talking about Super Mario Bros becoming public domain around 2075. A number of games will no doubt remain known, one way or another, much like some very old movies remain interesting and known, but a good portion will fall into the bin of “meh, who cares”. I mean, a huge number of games are already almost entirely forgotten.
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a good portion will fall into the bin of “meh, who cares”.
Some atari games are already there, and I literally had a module called “history of video games” at university. Those games came out in 1977 ish.
99% of games are basically dead and forgotten after 5 years, current copyrights expiration terms are completely nonsensical.
