That is like saying there are always books and movies to watch, so you shouldn't care if some old book (story) or movie is totally lost forever.

It depends if you consider games just as a irrelevant fluff that maybe should even disappear at some point... or in many cases even an art form that should be preserved.

So if I want to see some old legendary Chaplin movie I've heard about... should I just watch some recent comedy instead?

Right, because you believe that somehow you have the right to play any game you like. And if you can find some lame excuse such as "I hate the DRM they use"; "I don't like the practices of the company so its okay to take from them", or "I think they are selling it for too much", you think that makes it justified? The DRM argument is especially ironic because it is specifically done to prevent people like you from stealing it. People like you are why the rest of us law-abiding people have to suffer the potential ill effects.

If somebody didn't pay a cent on any game ever, I'm pretty sure there are enough legally free quality games to last a lifetime. Then if one takes into account some of the bundle discounts and the great games which have been available at $1 for 3 or 4 games especially from Humble Bundle, I find it hard to believe one needs to pirate any games whatsoever.

This whole argument about how necessary piracy is just an excuse for taking what isn't yours to take.
If you have to steal it to watch it? Yes!
I heard of Lamborghinis and seen them on TV. I heard they are great cars. Does that make it right to steal one and go for a joyride since I probably cannot afford one and I doubt they'd let me go on a test ride?

As game download sizes keep getting bigger and bigger (50+ Gb the norm for AAA titles these days), some gamers i know with data caps and have decided to get the pirated version of the games to save their data. The pirated version is usually one third the download size of the retail version. The new Wolfenstein is a good example (15Gb vs 50Gb).

Really?! Then why Heroes 4 addons suck so much, despite the fact I've payed for them? You blame people who didn't pay for ME3 for it's ending it's even more rediculous then all DRM ranting!

Again, the question is did they still decide to pay for the game anyway?

If you are a legal owner, as far as I'm concerned, all bets are off in terms of no-CD cracks, downloading DRM-cracked copies, making legal backups, adding language packs, etc. I don't personally consider any of that "piracy" as you are not taking anything you don't already own a license to and have a right to own.

The problem is we've already lost 50% of movies that was made before 1950, and 80-85% of movies made before 1928 forever. The same is hapening with games, we've already lost games that is part of renowned game franchises because the system they were on wasn't pirated.

For modern games that is being sold, yes piracy is bad and should be avoided, but to say that to download Alley Cat is illegal because IBM still hold the copyright and doing so would harm them financially is laughable.

Stealing Lamborghinis is only piracy if you're wearing an eye patch, have a pegleg and a parrot on your shoulder.

Why does one have to be considered a bastard? Note that a whole bunch of these "abandoned" games came out long before the digital game store was a thing. You made a game, it showed up on store shelves for a period, sales dropped off over time - as they always do for games - and stores no longer put them on their shelves. Essentially, the marketplace at the time dictated that the sales period for your game was essentially over except for the bargain bin. But the publisher was no longer printing disks, manuals, and boxes, and anything they shipped after that point was simply them making room for the next thing to come along.

You moved on, either to another game project or to some other income-generating endeavor.

Years later, digital game sales became a thing. People start to wonder why they can't find Game XYZ for sale online, even though it may have never been offered for sale online in the past. "I gotta have it - the game was available before but for some reason it isn't available now. Guess I can just take it." So either you let your property get pirated - because that's what "abandonware" is - or you allow it to be sold again. That requires dealing with the legal stuff of putting it on a store, or selling it to someone else so they can put it out there. That is, if the rights aren't tangled up somewhere along the line. And if you have the money to deal with the upfront costs that come with reintroducing it to the marketplace. And if you have the time to deal with it. And if there aren't other financial / legal reasons why it's better for you NOT to get it back out there.

None of that is reason for someone to decide they are allowed to have your game. Not your fault if a person didn't get to buy it first time around, or pick it up in the bargain bin, or from some online seller with a used physical copy. And there are literally thousands of other games that one can buy and play instead of simply snagging so-called abandonware.

So much this. ^^^ "But, but... I gotta have THAT one!" No, go play something else obtained legally.

Developer/publisher/rights holder doesn't care that we want to play their game legally but can't. We don't care if if they don't like that we download it "as abandonware".
Seems fair enough to me.

I guess we were talking about completely different things. I was talking specifically about "abandonware", ie. stuff that is not being sold (and most probably will not be sold), and the only way to experience would be, indeed, piracy.

Wrong example, Lamborghinis are still being made and sold. Plus, it is a different thing to talk about material things where stealing indeed takes into possession of something that another person can't use anymore.

The right example would be that would it be morally ok to clone (or build yourself) some old ancient sports car that has not been made for decades and is not sold anymore, to experience how it is to drive it. Well, is it?

The real question is whether you will still buy it when it becomes available again...even after you are done playing it?
Would you still support the developers since it was so important to you to relive an old game like that? If not, then it was piracy anyway.

To sum up the "Hell yeah - abandonware!" argument:

1. Someone made a game.
2. At least one copy was sold somewhere in the world, at some time, for some platform. The game may have come and gone long before digital distribution was a gleam in Al Gore's eye.
3. For whatever reason, the game is no longer available to buy.
4. Since it was on the market - however briefly, and possibly before the downloader was even born - it must then be available to all for free.
5. Therefore, if nobody is currently selling it for any reason then it must be made available for free to all by whatever means.

And many will justify it as if they are curators, with their copy ensuring that the game will always exist. Apparently there are millions of people maintaining some sort of video game Library of Congress on their hard drives.

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There's a well-entrenched segment of the automotive industry based on exactly that. The Ford / Shelby Cobra and Lotus 7 replicas are prime examples. I'd love to get my hands and feet on one the Lotus 7 models, and would have no qualms doing so in general since some of these cars are reproduced with technical input from the original manufacturers.

Wait, advocating downloading of ROMs for free isn't pirsting? You're one of the first to say emulated games should be free and point someone to ROMs. So which is it? Not a pirate or download ROMs illegally, even when the games are available for sale on Steam or Nintendo Arcade?

So it has been brought up multiple times here. What's the problem if the game will always exist? If at some point later in time you wanted to deny future buyers from buying the game in question, and through the muddy legal waters try to make piracy of the game that you want to make it 'lost' illegal and immoral and scare off anyone who attempts to play the game without paying for it which is by now an impossibility.

Why would you release the game in the first place if you later decide that not only it shouldn't be installed, but even that it shouldn't be distributed at all?

Another thing. It's also brought up time and again that it is your fault for not buying the game on time. Now suppose that Game 912 will disappear in the future. The next minute, the next hour, the next day, whenever it takes. The important part is that Game 912 will vanish in the future, however as an informed customer (read: I'm following closely the news related to the game), I'm oblivious to the plans to take it out of sale and there's a high probability that by the time I gather the required cash to buy the game, that it will have been taken out of sale. If it's going to be my fault that I was too late to buy the game, how can I avoid it?

We did that discussion before, a long time ago. On MAME specifically. Corporations didn't care for old games, until lots of people started playing and sharing their roms. Then they made the Roms illegal (even those of 30+ years old games and just FYI, usually 30 years means your typical copyright EXPIRES and needs renewal). At dawn of emulation, companies didn't give a sh_t. They still wouldn't, though, had players kept following fashion and trend, buying only their new games and staying there. We, the retro and old era lovers, became unwittingly and unwillingly, the fly in their soup; plus, the scapegoat, thanks to which roms got demonized and baptized "piracy".

There was an era of legality (grey legality, if you prefer), for roms. Your average weekly magazine gifted away entire collections of System16, Rayne, Mame roms and various other emulators.

I will never consider roms "piracy". Besides, 99% of the roms i download and play (from time to time, not excessively of course), i used to own them as a kid in their respective console. As i said many times, i play selectively.

Same goes on the opposite side, for fangames. Why should fangames be treated as copyright threats/breaches?