Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
No, older ones are no longer available for purchase.
I'm looking for a way to get Populous to play on my Vista machine. My 5" floppy is, erm, not useful here. Would I pay the $15 it originally cost? Probably not; $15 will get me a much more advanced game these days--but I'd happily pay $5.
Older games don't sell to new players because they can't buy them, not because there's no market. Most of the entertainment industries (books, movies, tv, video, music) are under the impression that the public really wants brand-new content every few weeks... when iTunes has proved that no, they want to listen to the 1-hit wonders from their teen years as much or more as they want the new chart-toppers, and the books they heard about in college and never got around to reading, and the comics their friends collected, and the movies that they saw with their first girlfriends.
Digital media has proven that we don't actually want to throw away pop-culture as soon as the broadcast run is over.
There'd be a booming market in older video games--bugs and all--adapted to play on new machines. It's just that it's not believed to be lucrative enough for the game companies to put resources in that direction, but they're too paranoid about losing money to license them out cheaply. (Or, as is often the case, the original company has vanished, and the games are now copyright orphans.)
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Even if you look at Steam and other downloadable content retailers that stock older games, they do not have anywhere near the sales of newer games, despite being a fraction of the price. You can still buy many many older games.