My friend and I were discussing this over the weekend. Games are inherently different than movies, books, and music. They’re tied to specific hardware and operating systems that may not be available anymore.
I argue that if a game is no longer legally purchasable from the publishers or developer, it should be legally permitted to pirate it. Even EA agrees! They do not pursue copyright claims against LOTR games, as they lost the publishing license from New Line Cinemas years ago.
It should be the same for everything: if an ip is no longer used, it should be in the public domain. Therefore, a company holding said IP is forced to use it (as in selling copies) or give it up.
Yes. I can imagine a middle-ground of copyright. If the IP is still being used, it enters the public domain on the regular schedule. But if it's abandoned, it enters earlier… perhaps after 5-10 years of non-use.
Honestly, in our fast moving world, I‘d do like a year. If nothing gets announced or release, you‘re done.
Example, you take a book, game or song from the market because you want people to be unable to buy it before you release the successor. Then you delay the successor for 5 yrs. Boom, public domain.
If you're trying to do it legally, you can easily to
rip your own ps1 games with a drive bay. Haven't tried it on PS2 or ps3 games. And ps1 emulation runs amazing on phones and raspberry pis.
I've been ripping PS3 games for a little while now. I've recently bought some Dynasty Warriors Gundam games from Japan which I'm dumping at the moment.
Armoured Core has especially been in a thorn in my side. I've got 4 and 5 but still trying to acquire For Answer and Verdict Day. They're extremely hard to come across. I haven't looked at the PS2 games but I'm sure I could find those for cheap. Super easy to rip with a standard Disk Drive.
I'm curious, can a standard Blu-ray drive on a PC rip PS3 games? Or do you need special hardware? I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to rip PS1 games.
I've read that you can use a Blue-Ray drive. The RPCS3 website has a proper guide on it though I haven't tried it. I jailbroke my PS3 (not fully because it's one of the 320GB models) and use that with FileZilla to dump games over the internet onto my PC.
That's very kind of you. I prefer physical CDs that I can redump if anything gets messed up. Haven't seen what I need to dump 360 games but I can give it a go.