There hasn’t been a lot of good news out of EA lately, but here’s some: the company just launched a bunch of classic games on Steam. The new (old) releases include nine games in total, spanning franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and SimCity.
Here’s the full list:
Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection
SimCity 3000 Unlimited
Populous
Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods
Populous: The Beginning
Dungeon Keeper Gold
Dungeon Keeper 2
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack
The Saboteur
It sort of seems like another shot across the bow at abandonware archiving.
I just picked a title at random- https://archive.org/details/DungeonKeeperGoldEditionUSAEnFrEsNlSvPl
As long as companies think they can keep making money from old games, they will keep trying.
I’m OK with them wanting to keep making money from it as long as they update it for compatibility with newer operating systems. Selling something they have completely abandoned us not cool.
Sure, but the abandonware version should still be archived and playable and the goal here is to make that impossible.
What makes you say that this is aiming to make that impossible? I picked up RA2 because it was cheap and I figured if I didn’t like the port (doesn’t work well, forces you to play on their application, etc) I’d just return it and so far it’s been good enough for me to use. The installation process was a lot easier than the original game and I was able to hop straight in and play. Haven’t had any issues with it yet.
So far I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this is anything but them catering to a different market that being the steam community.
There’s a reason why Nintendo keeps suing companies making emulators out of existence.
Yes I both am aware and agree that that would be acting against archives and the like. EA making these games available on Steam however is not the same as Nintendo suing emulators.