Depends on what you mean by "still work". If you bought them, you can download and play them. If you mean "Do they work on modern OS", it depends entirely on the game. You also have games that are still being sold but don't properly work on modern OSes without community patches (one example is Max Payne 1).
The same is currently happening with Forza games (at least Horizon ones, not sure about original Motorsport series). You can only buy the latest game, others have been delisted. You can still get physical copies, but the DLCs have been delisted as well, so you can't get the full version, at least not officially. And more than that, the online servers have been shut down as well.
It baffles me that this is still an issue, publishers are not concerned with implementing some sort of "kill switch" for expired content to keep getting money for the games. GTA also suffered from this.
> What's preventing me from buying, getting the offline installer and then sharing it later?
Nothing. People already do that. GOG does not fight against this, to my knowledge they believe that people will willingly pay for good games. It worked with Witcher 3 10 years ago as an example.
The idea of modern society is "get hyped for the new thing". Tech crowd did not escape that unfortunately, and keeps rediscovering techniques that were already possible more that 50 years ago. Because they don't want to learn the history of the technology they are using.
> and any money from sales goes to the company and its execs/shareholders
Some companies may share a profit. I heard that Activision used to pay some of the revenue from Call of Duty to the developers, although I can't confirm it. And it was a long time ago, not sure if they still do.
In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags)
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case).
That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.
> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
> Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever
Agreed. Most of the systems do not work as intended, the amount of content is very low compared to previous entries. There is no excuse for it to be released in such poor state, since Bethesda had already released two games for the same generation prior to that. And they did what they always do - ship a couple of updates and then just drop the game until the DLC is release and then promptly drop all the support. Even though there are still many bugs left in the game. They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. A very irresponsible developer.
> They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason.
Because of the lore, setting, and the openness of both (and the engine).
For a lot of ES fans (myself included), we aren't expecting an engaging game as much as a fun world sandbox set in the ES universe, with the ability to extend/mod it into whatever we want. The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
> The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
And Skyrim lacks in each aspect, especially compared to previous Elder Scrolls games. You have even less skills than in Oblivion (which in turn had even less skills than Morrowind). The dungeons (caves, forts etc.) do not offer any meaningful rewards, so there is little incentive to just randomly explore the world. The guild questlines are much shorter which doesn't help roleplaying when you can become a grandmaster in one evening of playtime. Moreover, there are randomly generated quests thrown in to pad the time, which is even worse.
I agree with Skyrim, but at least the bones are there for the modding community which ended up doing Bethesda's work and turning it into a decent game. I didn't mind the paring down of skills as much as I hated that they butchered the magic system. But modded, it's still one of my favorite games even if doesn't beat out Morrowind as my all time favorite from the series.
Even as a framework for mods it just mostly reuses previous tools. At least Bethesda themselves could have made the script extender rather than waiting for the community to develop. It tells us that they are willing to give modders the bare minimum and expect them to make additional tools themselves, which would be fine if the base game had well functioning mechanics. But it doesn't, and some things you cannot change via modding, so we are stuck with them unless an entirely new engine is developed. But Bethesda doesn't want to do any of this, nor does it want to help the community.
But still, even with all that, their primary focus was to make a game, not a modding framework, and they miserably failed, even though by that point that had enough experience to do so.
Preservation and ease of modification. New console units are not being made anymore, and the number of old ones is limited, they can break, and there is an issue with output video formats that are incompatible with modern monitors/TVs. There is emulation, but it's not perfect and can be demanding. Decompilations enable people to create native binaries for different platforms. This makes playing the game easier and more accessible.
