Be Excellent To Each Other

Is there a legal definition of "abandonware"?
Can a game be "abandoned" in one country and not another?
Does the advent of places such as GoG, mean that games that had previously been considered "abandonware" are no longer such?
If so, does that mean that it is illegal to d/l them?

What say, you lot?

Legally, there's no such thing and never was. Legally, everything everyone has been doing every day since the internet came into being has been illegal.

Morally though, well, that's going to start a big argument, no doubt, but as I see it, if nobody's selling it, copying/downloading it is the only way it's actually going to continue to exist. The game and music pirates of today will be the toast of tomorrow's game and music makers, not to mention historians.

I've previously downloaded games that have since become available thanks to sites like gog. I've since bought them where possible (and in once instance, bought another game in the series from the same developer, which I will never download). I'm lucky in that I can afford to do that now, but if not for abandonware sites and their communities, there are well over a hundred games I'd never even have heard of, let alone played or bought.

Abandonware is no more of a legitimate concept - in a legal sense - than those old rom sites in the early days of emulators that used to say you were ok to download the roms for preview purposes as long as you deleted them after 24 hours.

In a moral sense, I personally feel that when a game is no longer available via reasonable practical means and the people who originally made/distributed it are no longer realistically counting on any future income generated by it (ie, it was released on the N64 in 1999) then it's quite fair to download it - it's not going to affect anyone's bottom line.

I can appreciate this. Do the sites like GoG pay the developers/publishers? I assume they must, but ...?

Yes, of course. GOG has to negotiate publication rights for all their titles.

So, where would I stand with, say, d/l Panzer Dragoon Saga? A game I bought at full price, but no longer have, and that should I buy now, would be second hand, so no money would go to Sega anyway.

Well, you bought it once for full price, so sega have already got a nice sum out of you for it. I'd get it second hand, or 'acquire' it, depending on your preference. It's silly buying a thing at a high price twice, however much you like the devs.

Well, in this instance, it would cost 3 times what I paid for it to get it second hand. PDS goes for about £100 last time I saw!

Sega would perhaps argue that they might choose to re-release PDS on a new format so people downloading it could potentially hurt sales. Dunno if they would actually give a toss though to be honest.

It would be illegal to download it, without question. You owned a physical object, you don't have it any more; that doesn't let you take another one.

Immoral is harder to answer.

I struggled long and hard with this having owned Sim City 4 years ago but losing the disk and wanting to play it, but not approving of such things as Torrents. Eventually after several months, I went through the hard drive of my brand new laptop and magically discovered it there.

Its shit. I can remember now why I didn't look too hard for the disk originally.

Yeah, morality doesn't come into it, I was simply intrigued with the concept. I recently found a website with links to a shed load (over a hundred) of older RPGs on rapidshare/megaupload/et al describing them as abandonware and it got me thinking about it.

I thought I'd see if Emucation had Saturn games but sadly it's just up to Sega CD/Mega CD. However, that's still tempting as there's no copy protection on the Mega CD I think so I could download all those classic Mega CD games.... um.. ok, Eternal Champions.

DIE. DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE.

Not a fan?

If he is, I think his bearings have gone.

It's weird - I hated Eternal Champions on the Mega Drive but loved the Mega CD version.

A big Sega CD fan, actually. There's plenty of decent games worth playing on it, it's not just terrible FMV games and Eternal Champions.

I was actually a big fan myself at the time - Core seemed to know what they were doing with it with Thunderhawk, Soul Star and Battlecorps (I think that's what it was called) and I seem to remember completing one of the Eye of the Beholder games, even though its saved game took up most, if not all, of the internal saved game memory. Jurassic Park didn't seem too bad either.

I think it would just be Eternal Champions that I'd re-play though, just to see if I could get to see all the different kills.

Good Sega CD games also include Terminator CD (huge levels, excellent animation and sound track, great stuff), Third World War, Racing Aces, the full-talkie Wing Commander, the full-talkie Dune, the legendary Snatcher... I can't remember all the games I own but there isn't a true duffer among them.

Is this an entirely theoretical question? If it isn't: Just shut up and download it. No one will care or find out.

As I said, morailty hasn't entered the equation, I was simply intrigued by the concept. I will list the games when I get home so people can tell me which ones to get!