Woah, don`t bite my head off, just quoting!! ;p

The Escapist came up with this earlier with a mention of GOG too.

Read first sentence: Already filed it under "Why am I reading this?".

Now to see if my assessment was correct.

Didn't read it but aren't games always ageing? In 10 years time the Witcher 3 will be a good old game

There will be another dark age followed by another Renaissance. In the dystopian future when everything has gone to shits and people eat synthetic porridge, data archeaologists will unearth those old games which by then will be called Good Ancient Games, aka GAG. Same as happened with the rediscovery of classical Greek art that kickstarted the Italian Renaissance.

Someone should start a crowd-funding project in which we all contribute to send a capsule containing all the good games we currently have into outer space (except for Torchlight) so that even if human civilization on Earth gets wiped out by an asteroid or man-made catastrophe, alien drive-by tourists will be able to find the capsule and realize that us humans weren't completely incapable after all.

If nothing else it helps to understand what GOG sometimes goes through in getting their older titles here and running well. Hopefully virtualization (mentioned in the comments) helps things and a WinBox becomes a reality despite the difficulties.

With any luck all GOG's old games will be incapable with Windows 10, GOG will go out of business and Steam will continue to dominate, and we'll all have a big pity party with lots of synchronized SIGHING. :P

But if nothing else we'll always have this.

The main statement of the article is that it will be almost impossible to make todays games available in 10 or 20 years, because of windows and the hardware getting more and more complex. And the reason why we can play 20 year old games today is just because DOS is quite simple compared to Windows XP or Windows 8.

I should have read the article really but my attention span is approximately errr, what was I saying?

No worries :D

Woo-ha! Postal, Hotline Miami, Lula 3D... and Big Rigs...

Nah. 85% sure games will be fused with ai and will recode themselves and watch yaoi while they friend me on myspace.

np

Total BS

But VMs will step into the same role that DOSbox now serves. As hardware gets more powerful, processors get faster, and memory/storage gets cheaper, there should be no problem with wrappering a game in a VM that simulates a stripped-down OS of yesterday. Hell, that's what projects like UAE do now, and that doesn't just emulate the AmigaDOS operating system, but all the hardware too.

No need to sound the klaxons of doom quite yet.

but I just spent £5.27 on my Klaxon of Doom.... Can't I use it a little bit? Just to try? ...Pretty please?

the other more terrifying possibility is that 20 years from now there won't be ANY games, only statistically proven approved work farming entertainment. People are already paying for the privilege of alpha/beta testing games. With the right marketing companies could/will get people to pay for the privilege of programming and compiling games too.

But in reality, the clusterfudge that is AAA will no longer be a problem in 20 years. For every new DRM/data collection implementation, we have indies releasing beautiful games on GOG and Desura, Big publishers are not the keyholders to the premium engines anymore with Unreal and Unity now free. The power will slowly turn back to the individual like it always does until the next dark age. Yes we will lose some games to the mists of time, but the ones truly worth saving will be frankensteined back to life because art is treasured. I won't miss not playing Assassin's Creed (insert sequel) or Sim City 2013. Not to mention the rate at which technology and bandwidth is expanding, downloading an old game in a virtual XP or Win10 wrapper will probably be seen in the same way we see dosbox games.

We never thought we would get the original fallouts, but we did (however briefly) and they will be back too. No-one lives forever will also have its day as those games were neat.

Bingo, exactly what I was going to say.

This article is like arguments 20 years ago that we wouldn't be able to play old arcade games or NES games, etc. As technology progresses, new methods are discovered. Heck, there are some games on GOG right now that emulate a specific 3D graphics card technology (Voodoo) in order to offer hardware 3D graphics support...