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To round off this discussion, we also turned to gamers themselves to see if they had an opinion on abandonware. This question was posed to a number of online gaming forums: "Is abandonware the same as warez? Why or why not?" The responses may surprise you.

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How would you get technical support for this classic game?
According to one message board post: "When a game comes out, people can readily buy the game or steal it. There is a choice involved. Ten years after a game's out, people have to find the original copy (if no other editions were made) and then purchase it at the mercy of the seller. What about support for that game? I don't want to buy Privateer all over again and find out it's unsupported. I should have the same rights in 2002 as I did in 1994. If I can't get that, then not paying for it is a better decision. After all, Origin went under, so who gets the money? Who's gonna support my game?"

Another message board post responds: "I don't see how you can consider that stuff 'abandonware.' Someone still owns the trademarks and copyrights. If you are somehow arguing that the issue is that the games should be free simply because they are old, that seems lame to me. Even an old game has commercial value. Look at the Lost Treasures of Infocom and other 'classic' collections. Every once in a while, a game company gets a clue and makes a Win32 port of an older game. I wish someone would do that with Carrier Command or Ultima Underworld."

"It's a gray area, and that works out perfectly for the developers."
Says another poster: "There is a case to be made for the preservation of abandonware. The problem is that gamers usually value old games more than the companies do and are much more willing to do whatever is necessary to protect and archive those old games. If the company keeps a copy of the data and has a clear connection to the original author, then there's no reason why that company shouldn't be able to benefit from the game. Problems arise when those who hold the rights either don't know or don't care about the game and those who wish to preserve it have to resort to illegal actions in order to accomplish this preservation. In some cases, 'preservation' is the exact appropriate term: A lot of ROM dumps from arcade games are intended to preserve games whose chips, transistors, and circuit boards would have deteriorated."

Another poster states: "I'm not going to take the moral high ground on this issue, as I'm one of the people who downloads those old games and plays them. The way that I see it is thus: It's a gray area, and that works out perfectly for the developers. They wouldn't have it any other way. See, the fans who release the 'abandonware' games hype them, and that generates free publicity for the developer. It doesn't cost them any money, as they're not worrying about supporting the games or distributing them, and most of the profits for the game have been registered already at the time of the game's release. Besides, should the game garner a cult following, they can capitalize on it and release a newer 'episode' in the series with a guaranteed fan base, since the developer owns the rights to the franchise."


 
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