I found OnLive and Gaikai very good for demos, no time or space spent for installing, just log in a try the game. But yes, would not buy anything on OnLive.

On topic - I have no idea... I still play 20 year old games, but if you asked me 20 years ago I do not think I would have said I would play these games in the future. It all depends on situation, mood and nostalgia. And as others said - there will be ways of getting old games in the future also, unless internet collapses.

To me it seems that getting "unofficial" games and other media is becoming harder and harder, not easier. I mentioned elsewhere that at least for now Finnish ISPs are forced to block access to e.g. Pbay pages, and I seem to see similar reports from other parts of the world, e.g. even in India they apparently now have something similar, ISPs are blocking access to known pirate sites. This is also part of the general ACTA etc. discussion.

Yes, there may be indeed workarounds around them, but it is still harder and harder for casual users, and who can tell if those workarounds will be blocked as well? Soon you'll probably have to take part to some "Darknet" activity to be able to access any unofficial content, at which point the officials will start fighting it too. Who knows, maybe it becomes illegal to take part into Darknet activity, because "it is used mostly for kiddie pr0n etc. anyway"? Or ISPs start doing their best to block such activity on their networks.

I'm pretty sure I could easily list lots of dead torrent links, with 0 seeders. Internet is a good repository mostly to items of great interest, like 0-dAy w4R3Z. Not necessarily some obscure old game you want to replay.

Really? I was under the impression piracy today was easier than ever. Pirates will always find a way, and stuff like bittorrent can never be truly stopped.
But it still is somewhere. If you want to get to it, you will, one way or another.

20 years.... 20 years ago i was playing settlers 1 not sure whether i would like to replay it but did play a bit of settlers 2 recently.

Alpha protocol is quite likely candidate as well as vampire bloodlines. those games are character driven. that does not age.
probably transport tycoon. had been playing it since 95. a break from it for a year or three and then i restart it.
might try witcher 1 but doubtful.
definitely won't be touching any of bioware games since kotor. Kotor is possibility tough as i might get nostalgic for it. mass effect and dragon age won't do that for me (judging by how i feel about them now)
Half Life 1... there is something about this game which makes it really really awesome. do not see that in Half Life 2 which i love at least at the moment.
Grim fandango. I beat it for the first time few years ago and while I do not want to replay it now I can see myself replaying it 20 years from now just for the atmosphere, the jokes stuff like that.
While I barely touched Gemini Rue i really see the appeal of the game which might survive 20 years.
teenagent. simple game for me to play for nostalgic reasons. of course in polish completely voiced (stupid gog does not have voices)
wet the sexy empire.
Old command and conquer and warcraft games did not age really. shitty graphics is not an issue. interface is. while it was improved a bit so far there was not huge change in how you play rts. therefore the game can be playable in 20 years.
GTA... maybe. hard to tell.


of course i might check out a lot of other games. yet to actually play them in 20 years.... only those what i mentioned.
yet... i would say it is just a guess.

I'm pretty sure this is nothing compared to the heydays of e.g. Napster, DC++ and Kazaa when everyone and his mother was sharing whatever they had. Then people learned to be careful, afraid of RIAA/MPAA etc., and now we are on the second phase of ISPs starting blocking whole sites etc. Who knows what next.

I have quite many times failed to locate several older (and a bit obscure) titles in the past, after several attempts spanning over several months or years. I presume the reason is that there is very little demand for those items, or then they really have perished, at least from being online.

But I'm sure AAAA titles like Mass Effect 1-3 will probably be quite easy to find even 10 years from now, as long as you are able to find workarounds around the ISP blockings.

Civilization series, any of the good old rpg's BG1/BG2/PST/IWD/Fallout, any of the Football Manager/Championship manager (older versions) series (i actually buy heaps of games, but played like 10% of them. wat a waste. lucky most on sale har har!), certain visual novels/games & some jrpg's..

Fallout 2 and Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.

You honestly think piracy has dropped in the last 10 years? I know that neither of us is going to find numbers to back this up, but I find that impossible to believe.
Obscure items can be hard to come by, but sometimes they surface without you expecting it. It's happened to me a few times.

Silly example: quite recently, a friend brought me from Berlin a perfectly obscure vinyl record of 80s Czech pop stars singing their hits in dreadful German, because she knows I like these kinds of things. The problem is, I don't have a gramophone. Just for fun, I tried searching for it -- and found the whole thing in mp3s on the blog of some German collector who I suspect must be mildly insane. I have since ripped the record myself, but this was something I honestly did not expect to be on the internet -- and yet it was.

And there are always the virtual abandonware museums, who do a lot of good work to preserve the rarer stuff. What Home of the Underdogs used to be, and Abandonia is today. As long as there is one copy somewhere in existence, nothing is lost; if someone knowledgeable gets a hold of this copy, rare may become common overnight.

Guess I'll still be hoping for playing my GOGs ...soon.

I'll still add something about type of games that I'll more likely (re)play in the distant future. Genres that I once liked, but the genre has dried up later, ie. there simply are not much of newer games in the same genre.

I'm not sure if there are good new mech games for example, but I feel I'll be playing the old mech games just because I am not aware of newer ones. There was that one mech game on XBox180, too bad you had to have a special controller for it.

Even though Heavy Gear doesn't feel quite as good as Mechwarrior games (e.g. I miss the energy weapons and related heat problems), it still reminds me why I always liked MW games so much.

The nice thing is that I've yet to play Mechwarrior 3-4 (and Heavy Gear 2), even though I own them... :) I also have some old Armored Core games for older Sony consoles, but I am unsure if they are anything like MW series. We'll see.

One thing I should mention is that you are preaching to the converted on this forum of all places. This is a site that makes its living out of selling games that are 10-20 years old, and its target group is made up of people who make a habit of playing games like that. Sure, the motivations may be different - be it convenience, compatibility, or having sold the games at an earlier time - but ultimately we are a community that places a lot of value in our cultural gaming heritage.

At the same time, said target group is well aware that not all games will or can be available for sale in the future. Games like the old 90s FIFA games, Anstoss (due to the Bundesliga rights), Need for Speed, The Godfather and so on and so forth will probably never reappear simply because the licensing deals between the rights owners and publishers have expired.

The rights to other games may belong to development studios that have since gone out of business and are in limbo or are owned by some asset management company or or insolvency administrator that doesn't want to do anything with them except sell them for ridiculous amounts of money (System Shock, do you hear me?)

Point is, while we can hope that a portion of the games will be rereleased in years to come, others will probably be lost for good. Sure, we can rely on cracks to get around the DRM for some more popular ones, but there will be little incentive to crack or upload more obscure titles.

I also doubt that relying on piracy is very reliable. At least for multiplayer games with dedicated servers this should fail very often.

From a point of view of opportunity any DRM including but not limited to non-standalone patches or archivable DLC installers are bad for the technical side of replayability. It means putting up more hurdles than necessary. So games on GOG have one of the highest chances of being still playable in 20 years from all the games out there.

From a practical perspective, the number of games I will play, will be rather small. Some great adventures, some great strategy games and occassional simulations/rpgs.

Maybe they will start making remakes regularly which are quite true to the original, just with minor improvements in compatibility, graphics, interface, ... and with a "play the true original mod". This way they could earn money and preserve the classics.

MP-only games are a completely different kettle of fish. Once you lose the player base, it does not really matter whether the actual software survives or not, through piracy or otherwise.

But as other people have said, there are plenty of other people out there who have a wide variety of tastes. You may only play X, Y and Z game in the future, but there are others that will play A, B and C game, and you may have the odd person playing D game. An example of "D game" in this case being Caesar 2. I play it quite often because I enjoy it, but it has disappeared into obscurity now in place of the latter two games.

But why should I be forced to repay for a game that I already have? Sure, if there are certain enhancements that I choose to go for (like the recent Monkey Island remakes) then fine, but if I'm perfectly happy with the original as-is, then there is no moral or legal right to deprive me of that game in the future unless I hand over more money.

And as I say: this doesn't address the issue of more obscure titles disappearing.

Probably none of them. 10 or 20 years is a long time and technology might have changed enough for us not to even have PC's but tablets or some other tech with a completely different OS that won't let me play games that are too old.

Unreal Tournament games and Starcraft 1 & 2 are the two games I've played longest or repeatedly, so chances are I'll be playing the new versions of those instead of the old ones.

Once I've finished the single player campaigns, if the game doesn't offer much in gameplay or if it becomes too repetitive even if I haven't finished all the side quests, I'll be likely to drop it.