This whole discussion about DRM, Single-Player dying out, DLCs ceasing their existence, in general the notion of games as a service for a limited time brought me to thinking about the replayability strength of video games.

Of course customers of GOG love to replay their all time favorites, even if they aged especially in terms of graphics and usability.

But I know alot of games that I will probably never ever play again. Some RPGs for example because well the story is already told and the fights were mindless grinding. I really don't need them.

Simulations or strategy games, them I would probably like to play again. Racing games or sports games ... well there surely will be another version of them in 10 years which I can buy new.

Do we really need to firm stance for games being available for all times? I for myself could probably name much less than 10 games that I would like to play over and over again.

What's your opinion? How many games are there you couldn't "live" without?

That's one of the reasons I don't care about DRM, actually. My Steam library has a "Finished" category which contains games I'll probably never ever play again, and genuinely wouldn't care if I lost ownership of them this very minute. I do replay games I liked if they have multiple endings and are short (like Bastion, which I did actually replay in the New Game Plus mode), but a 40 hour monster? No way.

It's the same as with books or movies. There are some that are still good, or perhaps even better, after multiple readings/viewings because they were designed that way (like, say, 12 Monkeys, Ulysses, Watchmen), but the vast majority of them are just not worth it, because you'll only be getting the same thing as before, just with a weaker effect because it's already familiar to you.

But this is from someone who prefers story-based games. I imagine it's different with random generated (roguelikes and their ilk) or strategy games.

There are undoubtedly quite a few I'll never play again.

But at the moment I'm playing Albion, Caesar 2 and Pro Pinball The Web, all of which I bought well over a decade ago. I've also played Forsaken, Tempest 2000, Simon the Sorceror and Baldur's Gate (the latter two off my CD versions, although I've installed my GOG version now as a replacement to avoid the horrendous CD swapping in BG).

I've also just got back into Need for Speed 3 after discovering the excellent Vista installer, which also works on Win7. Need for Speed 3's online multiplayer is obviously offline now, but at the time it was inconceivable that it might ever go down. I mainly play single player and over LAN though.

Just imagine if NFS3 wouldn't have started without connecting to the online service first...?

The thing is that I am not even sure what media I will use to play games 20 years down the line, whether desktops/notebooks are still around by then, or will we have some new kind of machine that are not invented yet today. So it is kind of difficult to answer the question.

For me there is a number of games that really don't age, every time I play them it feels fresh.
Funny thing is that most of these games already are 10-20 years old.

Stuff like Diablo I & II, Warcraft II, Heroes of Might and Magic II & III, Doom I & II, Blood, Black Isle era RPGs.

From newer stuff, I'll have another go at New Vegas one day (there is just so much content there, and choice and consequence) and Katauri King's Bounty games (fortunately they keep making expansions so you can continue to play the game with fresh content without replaying the same one).

I too have a "Finished" category in Steam (and with it, a "finished" shelf), but it's generally reserved for games that I'm pretty sure I'll never come back to again - simple stuff like 7 Wonders.

Again and again I've played games through in the belief that I'll never come back to them and I've surprised myself once or twice. I always seem to have a crack at GTA3 every couple of years to see if I can get all the packages and get 100% completion (which I never have) even though I never had the intention of going back to it. That, and I always play Beyond Good and Evil through once in a while just for the excellent story. As the irreverent Dr. Ian Malcolm once said, "life finds a way". I know plenty of people who have installed floppy drives in their PCs (or at least have USB ones) for the sole purpose of running old floppy games.

If you have games and want to play them, there's no doubt in my mind that you'll seek out the hardware you need to run them. Hell, I still see record players for vinyls being sold new because people still prefer them.

The question seems to be about replaying games, not whether you buy a game now, but will not play it properly until much later (which is quite normal for me; maybe 80% of the PC and console games I've bought over years, I've yet to play properly. Still, I want to give most of them at least a chance.). Currently I'm playing mostly Heavy Gear (1997) and Diablo 2 LoD (2001) for the first time, which I've bough god knows how long time ago.

As for the question of replaying, I don't get a big urge to replay most games I've finished once (but still some). I didn't even replay Max Payne 2 (or was it 1?) to see some optional ending, I just didn't feel like going through all of it again just for that. However, for some reason many RTS games are replayable, and some RPGs, especially if the RPG offers different experience based on which kind of character you select/create.

I've played games like Starcraft, Age of Empires 1-2 and Age of Mythology single-player through several times, and I always need to convince myself to try out some new game instead of launching one of those games again. They are almost like playing Tetris. Also if I get hooked on some Civ or MOO type of games, I'm pretty sure I'd want to replay them several times as well.

I feel Diablo 2 LoD may enter this category too, at least I feel I might want to try to play it with Druid and Necromancer sometime in the future, which is suprising because I didn't like the game at first.

I generally feel action games have less replay value for me, but there must be a reason why I've played Serious Sam 1st & 2nd Encounters through several times as well. For most action games, I don't get a similar urge for replay.


Anyways, as said, my main issue with DRM is not preventing me from replaying games I've finished it the past (albeit I want to have that option, if not for other reason but let my grandchildren try what kind of games their grandpa liked a century ago), but because so far I've had the tendency to buy games from sales etc., without knowing when exactly I will start playing it. If I hadn't done this, obviously I wouldn't have a huge gaming backlog, duh.

Hence, I'm very careful of buying DRM games, not until I'm sure I'd start playing them. I think Mass Effect series has now entered my "to-be-played-in-the-future" list. ME1 and ME2 seem to be pretty affordable at Steam currently and I am pretty sure I would buy them into my backlog already now, if they were DRM-free.

But since they are not, I have so much less reason to buy them now, but postpone the purchase until I am sure I will play them (e.g. when I have actual HW to run them in the first place; I have already bought e.g. Witcher 1-2 even though I don't think my current HW can run them at all).

And of course it is possible I don't buy the ME games ever, for example if I become distracted by some other games and forget about them, or I become fed up with gaming overall. So, it is one lost sale for the makers of ME, but maybe they couldn't care less what I do. After all, I'm a filthy PC gamer anyway, consoles are where it's at. :)

I'm definitely also steering clear of all kinds of "get 20 games for 99.99€!" multimegapacks from Steam or elsewhere, for the reasons mentioned above. Well, unless I was quite sure I'd start playing all those 20 games in succession right away. I simply don't want to buy anything I possibly never get to enjoy, even if it is only a matter of losing 10 bucks.

A lot. Despite being a retro gamer as well I do love a lot of today's games. I still play Daggerfall and I would guess I will still play Skyrim in 15 years.

There are of course one-offs you never play again, but any good shooter or RPG has a good chance of getting a second playthrough from me.

Still adding to the earlier message: even for games which I might not replay myself, I still consider many games as works of art that I still wish to preserve, be it for checking it out myself later, or showing it to someone else. This can be even little things in them, like the magnificent music the game had, or the great intro. Freespace, anyone? Sure there is Youtube, which helps sometimes...

Many adventure games are like this, for example Sanitarium and Grim Fandango. Most adventure games have very little replay value (because after you know the solutions to the puzzles, they are little more than story-books where you have to click somewhere every now and then to advance the story), but I'd still hate to see those games perish.

I'll probably never watch Terminator 1-2 ever anymore, but still I don't want them to perish either, and want to have the option to see them, or show to someone else. For Terminator 3, I couldn't care less. :)


Oh yeah, one more thing. I know a couple of kids who have a Nintendo Wii at home. Guess what they play the most on that system nowadays? The original Super Mario Bros games which they bought from the Wii online shop. Go figure, games that were made long before they were born.

This.

Around 70% of my games collection are impulse purchases. The selection I've quoted above are actually games I've played and finished in the past (except Baldur's Gate, which I'd always given up on previously because I found level grinding to be too frustrating) but I do have a significant number of games that I've had for years and barely touched. I don't regret it, because I do eventually come back to games and realise what I've been missing, and many of these games are difficult to acquire nowadays.

Since DRM and digital distribution has become so omnipresent, however, I generally only buy those games that I know I will play in the near future, which has reduced my expenditure considerably. I simply don't know if I will be able to play them 5-10-20 years down the line, so they have absolutely no value as an impulse purchase and absolutely no value for a collector. They are also a risk factor if I don't know the game already because I also don't have the option of selling them.

It's all very well these publishers saying "oh, we'll patch the DRM out when the time comes", but the fact that they explicitly exclude this obligation in their EULAs makes me deeply suspicious.

There are certain games that are very dear to me, like HoMM 1-3, Warcraft 1-3, Starcraft 1-2, and certain online games as well. If I'm not dead in 10-20 years and these games are still available somewhere somehow, I'm sure I'll revisit them from time to time.

Oh yeah, one more thing... The thing is, at least I don't know beforehand for sure which games are keepers to be played several times, and which I couldn't care less after playing them the first time for 5 minutes. Hence, I want the option by default, and I make the decision whether I want (and can) replay it later, not the publisher. I never expected to get so hooked on e.g. Serious Sam games, or Age of Empires (which to me seemed like very dry and uninteresting historical RTS games, zzzzzzzzzzzz... until I actually played them myself, long time after their original release).

How about if a game you personally dislike is a keeper to someone else? Should that game then be available only for a short time, or not?

I will play the RoA series until the end of time. Of the "current gen" I will probably come back to the current Bioware titles, especially ME and DA. Apart from that, I don't know.

I'm not afraid that I won't be able to play all those games anymore. Piracy will serve as a "public library" for at least the more famous games. It already does that. Whenever I want to play an older game I can't rebuy digitally, I rather pirate it then go rummaging through my discs. With torrent networks it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep games in circulation.

Very much so. The internet is among other things the single greatest repository we've ever had. Nothing is ever truly lost on the internet, for better or worse, and worrying about future availability of anything that's ever appeared online is utterly pointless.

(This, of course, does not apply to fully streamed services, such as OnLive, which is one of the reasons I'm not going to use those unless I have a very good reason.)

I rather use the original because quite possibly the torrent version is the initial unpatched version, and if you update it with the latest official patch, you possibly have to hunt down also a new updated crack for it as well, which might or might not be available.

In that sense, rummaging the original CD from the cup board may still be much more straightforward and painless. And if there are issues, at least I know it is not because I'm using an "unofficial edition".

For GOG games, I always select the GOG version of course, and leave the CD in the cupboard.