Carmack

There's a pretty common response I see whenever discussing the importance of supporting game's preservation, or really just, tech preservation in-general. It's something to the effect of...

"You delete Youtube videos though. Why should companies keep things they don't care about when you don't."

Because I'm not selling products. I'm not a multi-million dollar company. And I made not one penny off of the free content I did delete remove 10+ years after the fact, not three.

I've been watching more Louis Rossman video's recently, and his one about Adobe products had a simple quote that's really stuck with me. He said "We always point the finger at each other, rather than at the people who are actually screwing us."

You've got companies like Adobe, that are straight up revoking access to products people legitimately purchased Creative Suite's 2, 3, and 4, and the first thing many will say is "Why are you using software from 2008" rather than discussing how royally fucked the idea of a company revoking your legitimate access is.

"But the servers need to be retired."

Is Adobe broke?

Are they losing money?

Can they not handle the activation servers for products from 2008?

Nah, they just don't want to deal with this anymore. Paying money to retain customers that could just be giving them more money if they were to move to the latest product, and you see this all across various industries, who in the right mind would invest in an outdated product to make it more accessible to people who own it?

John Carmack apparently.

It came out recently that Oculus Go, very much the test bed for what would later become the Oculus Quest, the machine Facebook (or Metaverse -_-) is now using to lock-off software exclusives, would receive an update granting owners full root access to the Oculus Go operating system, allowing the device to be fully functional decades from now.

Reportedly, John Carmack had been pushing this for years, and you'd assume he's pushing up against the other executives and figure heads of the parent companies, who just by their very system, don't see the point in spending time giving people more access to a dated piece of hardware and/or software. John Carmack also said "Getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort than you would expect."

It could be the executives, but it could easily be everybody beyond Oculus too. Presumably, lots of company's creating apps for Oculus Go weren't allowing them with the intention that they'd remain on the Headset for decades to come. They may not have a problem with that, but it certainly wasn't on the table, because it never is in the world we live in.

We have the greatest means for preserving works of all kinds, and yet, we put so little value into it, though that's not to say beyond piracy, we can really do much about it. Without laws to enforce long-term support, people like Carmack are the only chance a company will ever bother spending the time to preserve products and works of the past, and sadly, there's way more of them, than him.