Well, as the person who started this thread it's about time I chimed in. Good getting the viewpoint of the person who originated. (Glad you signed up. Hope you hang around.) Now, here's MY viewpoint on it.
The petition is a good thing. I don't entirely agree with how it stated it, but I agree with the motion. However, it's a vastly complicated issue and I don't think this petition addressed it entirely. Let's break it down.
To start with, the only option that everyone will be 100% happy with will be if we are free to have and play whatever games we want for free. Let's be honest with ourselves, that's the option that no one will complain about. The next step towards a middle ground would then be any game who's company is still in business offer their game for download at a modest price, the more modest the better. They don't need to update or support the games, just so long as they are runable in some form or another. The next step would be something like having companies offer their games in some physical medium at pretty much retail prices. Epic MegaGames pretty much does this still. It's successful in preventing whiners from claiming their games are abandoned, but I don't know was sort of revenue this brings in. The last step would be that every game ever offered or sold still be on the shelves, fully supported, at full retail. Blizzard does this with certain titles, but that's because their games just plain rock.
Now let's turn things around. The reason why game companies don't do any of these options is because it takes time and money to implement any distribution paradigm. So asking them to just give their games away, games that represent significant investments of money, even if that investment was years ago, is just no acceptable. And the "modest fee" idea is hard for them to swallow. You want them to take a game which probably didn't make it's money back the first time around, throw more money at it, and have it almost guaranteed not make it's money back the second time around. It's not reasonable. And as for offering them on the shelves, the software retail industry is a mess. Trust me on this one, ain't gonna happen. In the end the easiest and most cost effective thing is for them to sit on their licensees and deny anyone the right to do anything with them.
So we're at an impasse. We want the games, they don't want to give them to us. So what do we do?
In my opinion, the best solution would be an extention of something that's already happening. There are a few third party services that license old games for download and play, designed to work on modern systems through their software, at a modest fee. If some new company were to do this for old DOS games or an existing company expand to old DOS games and tell companies all they needed to do was give their okay and they'll get a nickel every time someone plays their game, there's the chance that it might work. There'll still be the mooches who run around the seedy alleys of the internet "sharing" their stolen goods, but at least they wouldn't have the excuse of not having any legitimate option. My only complaint with these services is they charge month-by-month for their games. I don't play those games enough to justify month-to-month. Personally I'd rather drop $1 to $5 (depending on how good it is) and be able to play it whenever I want from now till forever, but that model may not be cost effective. Still, this may be the best solution. Get some company that already does downloads of Atari or Genesis or PlayStation 1 games to adopt DOS games, or have some new service emerge that specializes in making this crowd happy do the same thing.
Personally, I have great hope for these sort of monthly services. If they gain popularity, merge, and especally migrate to perhaps X-Box or the revolution so that old games could be played from people's couches, it could be the start of a brave new world, only without all the scary drug references. It would be like cable for games. But making this happen is not the thing of petitions. First of all, existing services need to find support and their CEOs need to be written (by paying customers even better) and be told that it would be a good idea for them to take steps as outlined above. If the money people think it's a good idea it happens.
Man, that's alot of writing. Kudos to anyone with the stamana to read it all.
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