My son is also a gamming lover. Recently I gifted him a new PS5.

They certainly don't. Lots of people raged about D3 being online-only and it made no difference. When the expected server outages started with Diablo 4 and people started losing their hardcore characters, people also demanded offline mode. Blizzard haven't even bothered to respond. It doesn't matter to them, because money keeps pouring in either way.

It's not going to change, unless there's a regime change that cares about game preservation and we all know that Microsoft doesn't care either lol.

There's an old interview with the head of Xbox (Phil Spencer) on Giant Bomb where Jeff Gerstmann confronted him a little on game preservation. Spencer's response was basically "I would love to invest time and money into that, but we've just got way too much else to do to bother." He even mentioned GOG, and Spencer basically said he didn't have time to pay attention to anything but Steam and their own store.

That's the problem with corporations, everything is about the bottom line. Now corporations own all the movie studios too and you can see how that's going. Corporations owning media is always a negative IMO, in a different way than say textiles or oil or whatever.

Which always sounds like BS. We have single-developer games on GOG that get updated regularly, such as Tunguska, yet the bigger the corporation is, the less time and resources they have to preserve games... Pffff. I don't believe it for a second. It's all cow poo.

Would you be able to dig up a link to that interview?

It's not that they can't afford it, I don't think they even pretend they can't. It's that everything in a corporation revolves around the maximum return on investment. Why both spending time and resources on something that isn't going to make you as much as that other thing over there.

It was an E3 interview years ago, I'm not gonna search for it no offense.

Do you remember the year by any chance?

That's triple-A in a nutshell.

Indie games and old games have pretty much saved my gaming life, there are so many fun and interesting old games I never played that I discover through sites like GOG, and so many passionate Indie developers making games that are better than triple-A games.

If you are a franchise-holder, then if you're not making your product for the fans ... you're not making it for anybody. That's the bottomline. You need to please the existing fans of a franchise first and foremost, because they are the ones who will stick with the TV-show episode after episode, pay to see a movie more than once, buy a game at launch, buy merchandise related to the new product, and so on.

That's what Disney and much of Hollywood don't understand. You can't design a new audience when it comes to a franchise. If it's a brand new IP you can. You especially shouldn't attack the franchise fans, that's just insane.

People like blaming the actors, actresses, voice actors etc. since they are most obvious representation of a badly made product, but the actual problem is the half-assed production and terrible writing.

Look at Amz's Lord of the Rings tv-show. They had a billion dollars to spend on it. A normal and rational person would have brought in the very best Fantasy writers you could get with that level of funding. You know, real writers, people who have writtten successful books. And there's no shortage of great female Fantasy book authors. if you want to make some sort of socio-political statement.

Yet that's not what they do at Disney and in Hollywood, they hire people who know little or nothing of the franchise, don't even like the franchise, and/or have never actually written a book or novel in that genre. No wonder they keep failing.

There are exceptions of-course, I think we all have one or two we think are good or OK. I did not enjoy Star Trek Discovery for example, but really liked the animated series Star Trek Lower Decks, I think it was great.

At a quick glance, think it's probably a video interview, which makes it a pain to search, but:
2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYph4FCz8AE
2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70z2jtcQf4s
2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w-Ifxmqd5c

Yeah, I skimmed through quite a few going all the way back to 2015, but I couldn't find a part about him talking about GOG. The closest thing to game preservation was Phil congratulating himself about backwards compatibility on Xbox. This is why I asked StingingVelvet for a year.

My love of the industry is over. The exciting days of the video game "Wild West" are long gone. Now it's factory output, like industrially manufactured sausages.

My love of games?

It ebbs and flows. Most times I find games uninteresting when I'm retreating from real life... when I need to re-connect with friends and / or nature... or when I need physical accomplishment; as much as I love games, the completion of a game doesn't -- for me -- have nearly the same level of accomplishment as a real life goal. Sometimes its worth working on real life goals for a bit...

... games will always be there when you want them.

Or maybe it's worth just getting out of the "modern gaming space" and play some old games?

I've never been a person that loved old games (although I grew up on Atari 2600, Zork, etc.), but as I get older, I slowly find myself drawn more-and-more to those experiences (or indies that replicate those experiences). Nostalgia? Maybe... but it has kept me gaming when I've lost faith in most of the modern AAA space.

Ive discussed this issue on other forums so really dont want to bother hashing it out here but no, Disney did NOT have a plan with ST and Rey.

Yes, KK and crew did have an initial storyboard where they laid out what they thought Star Wars was (which is a good laugh to read) and people use this is justify that they had an overarching idea. At the very beginning, you can say they had an idea of how they wanted the story to go.

Problem lies in execution. Rian Johnson repeatedly states in interviews that he was free to do whatever he wanted and wasnt tied down or forced to follow any story beats. Its why Rey is a "nobody" who was sold for drinking money. If Abrams wasnt forced back in to direct the finale (which he originally wasnt), Rey being a nobody would have been the result we got.

And while Rey was always meant to be someone special according to Abrams, even actress Daisy Ridley stated that her origin would bounce around with script rewrites, being a Kenobi at one point too. Given the general story narrative of episodes 7, 8, and 9 with the major retconning in 9; its clear there was no planned out story for ST and using music motifs as your "evidence" just shows how weak your argument is.

I always found Rebels to be ok. Rogue One was enjoyable for what it was (although it adds some plot holes) and given the fact that it was completely reshot weeks before release, it being as good as it was was honestly more luck than talent.

Completely agree on the shows. Kenobi was a story that didnt need to be told (and also adds a plot hole with its ending) but seeing McGregor on screen with Christensen is always nice. Christensen did a great job too. Mando was good for one season and then went to shit and its going to stay there given its direction. Andor is too early to tell but Im guessing will also go the way of Mando given Disney Star Wars. Also get the impression that people who like Andor dont really like Star Wars given the fact that most praise for the show emphasize the fact that its "Star Wars but not Star Wars."

I dont think Lucas is infallible and do think PT was a terrible product but do think it had good ideas that could have resulted in a great trilogy if Lucas had some other talented director to work with who wasnt a yes man. ST, I cant find anything redeeming in its story.
Agree with checking out of modern gaming. Modern games arnt even fully complete until about 1 year and a half following its release with all the DLC and updates tacked on now. Sometimes the game is just a broken mess with Day 1 players basically paying to be beta testers for the game. While updating games to fix them is nice, its become a crutch for modern gaming.

The good thing is despite the issues with game preservation, great old games still exist. Currently going through Yakuza 2 Kiwami and its great. Having fun with that game although I was a fan of the series (played 1 and 0). I do admit that some modern games still look interesting but I dont have any incentive to buy now given my reason above.