I was just looking at my collection of what I consider MY classic games (from this generation since there in lies the problem) that I always intend to have, some of the games among them are; Bioshock, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Alan Wake, Alpha Protocol, Red Dead Redemption, Dead Rising 2, Left 4 Dead and a few others. Then it dawned upon me: What will happen to my games when the next console generation comes out? This was a question that previous generations never had to deal with aside from "There won't be any new games and I will probably need a new system".
Some may say that this would still apply in the next generation, but there's the fact that the current iterations of Xbox Live and the Playstation Network WILL be turned off. Don't get me wrong, they'll be kept alive, updated and changed for their new games, but your PS3 and Xbox 360 won't be able do anything with them. This leads to an ungodly amount of problems.
This generation of consoles has shown that not only do they not care for backwards compatibility and that they would rather block this route off and force you to buy your games again, this can be seen easily in that the Xbox 360 does not play a fair few Xbox games because it would have taken too much effort to program and then there's Playstation robbing people of their backward compatibility after the fact, only to recently opt to begin selling them again. Look at the few games that all systems are actually reselling and compare that to the unbelievably vast catalogue of games that the PS2 alone had.
Previous generations of games never had online capabilities until the last one and even then it was very rarely used because the internet it was not nearly wide spread enough at a strong enough level for it to be a very good idea, meaning almost all games were the same at release as they are right now, all tests and fixes were done on base and no new content came out. Now, because it's easier, a great deal of game fixes are done post-release, meaning people need to download fixes, some being minor irritations to a select few being complete game breakers.
The previous point leads to DLC and DRM that locks out your shit. This content will be lost, probably forever. You won't be able to enter a code to download it if by some miracle you found an unopened copy after all those years, you won't be able to buy the content because there is no longer a store. It is gone. Even the shit that is already on the disk because EA are fuck puppets.
Until this generation ends all a person has to do if they wanted to play an old game is have the system and the game in question. If someone felt that they wanted to see what made FFVII a "classic" then they could buy an old Playstation (or Playstation 2) and the game and they would have the full experience that everyone else did, the game is still there. If 10 years from now, on a forum just like these a person heard ravings about the Classic that is Red Dead Redemption and they decided that they must try it then there's a problem: They can't. Unless they somehow got their hands on someone elses Xbox 360/PS3 that had the game on the hard drive, all the patches, and the ungodly amount of DLC, then there is no way they can experience the game in its full (ignoring the fact that there is a GOTY version of this particular game with all the DLC) form.
When their online capabilities are gone from the consoles, our current generation of games will die. Sure, we can find used copies and play the majority of them, but unlike previous generations these games will not be their true versions, they will have been gutted simply due to the fact that it's how the industry works and there will not be any way of paying $5 to have this problem fixed. There are almost no games that have physical copies of their DLC (and a lot of those only work for a single install), leaving so many games as nothing but memories.
My question is this: What do we do? and moreover, Could it even be changed at this point?
NOTE: I couldn't put every problem I wanted in here, I could not find the right words.
Some may say that this would still apply in the next generation, but there's the fact that the current iterations of Xbox Live and the Playstation Network WILL be turned off. Don't get me wrong, they'll be kept alive, updated and changed for their new games, but your PS3 and Xbox 360 won't be able do anything with them. This leads to an ungodly amount of problems.
This generation of consoles has shown that not only do they not care for backwards compatibility and that they would rather block this route off and force you to buy your games again, this can be seen easily in that the Xbox 360 does not play a fair few Xbox games because it would have taken too much effort to program and then there's Playstation robbing people of their backward compatibility after the fact, only to recently opt to begin selling them again. Look at the few games that all systems are actually reselling and compare that to the unbelievably vast catalogue of games that the PS2 alone had.
Previous generations of games never had online capabilities until the last one and even then it was very rarely used because the internet it was not nearly wide spread enough at a strong enough level for it to be a very good idea, meaning almost all games were the same at release as they are right now, all tests and fixes were done on base and no new content came out. Now, because it's easier, a great deal of game fixes are done post-release, meaning people need to download fixes, some being minor irritations to a select few being complete game breakers.
The previous point leads to DLC and DRM that locks out your shit. This content will be lost, probably forever. You won't be able to enter a code to download it if by some miracle you found an unopened copy after all those years, you won't be able to buy the content because there is no longer a store. It is gone. Even the shit that is already on the disk because EA are fuck puppets.
Until this generation ends all a person has to do if they wanted to play an old game is have the system and the game in question. If someone felt that they wanted to see what made FFVII a "classic" then they could buy an old Playstation (or Playstation 2) and the game and they would have the full experience that everyone else did, the game is still there. If 10 years from now, on a forum just like these a person heard ravings about the Classic that is Red Dead Redemption and they decided that they must try it then there's a problem: They can't. Unless they somehow got their hands on someone elses Xbox 360/PS3 that had the game on the hard drive, all the patches, and the ungodly amount of DLC, then there is no way they can experience the game in its full (ignoring the fact that there is a GOTY version of this particular game with all the DLC) form.
When their online capabilities are gone from the consoles, our current generation of games will die. Sure, we can find used copies and play the majority of them, but unlike previous generations these games will not be their true versions, they will have been gutted simply due to the fact that it's how the industry works and there will not be any way of paying $5 to have this problem fixed. There are almost no games that have physical copies of their DLC (and a lot of those only work for a single install), leaving so many games as nothing but memories.
My question is this: What do we do? and moreover, Could it even be changed at this point?
NOTE: I couldn't put every problem I wanted in here, I could not find the right words.