As stated in the article for anyone who missed it: it’s still available on GOG and is DRM free there. It’s also currently discounted to $4.99, so if anyone is worried about having (legal) access to the game then that option is still available (for now).
Can it run Crysis? Only if you already bought it.
It doesn’t need to be always for sale to be preserved my copy is still there and it’s still playable. It’s only lost of those that paid for it can’t play it.
That’s the first and biggest step in it being lost to history.
And when you die and your next of kin tries to recover your password and gets told by Valve that it’s not within the TOS, your copy will be just as gone and the game will be just as unperserved.
The high seas still has it’s copy as well. Heck many times I find the copy on the Internet Archive ready to go.
uh. Shit.
I dont even know if I have a digital copy of that game. Not that I was ever gonna play it again…
I always considered it a novelty of the 2000s. It was the game I used to break in my first gaming PC, and it wasnt’ even that good of a PC to run it in the first place.
I’ll believe a PC game can be actually lost when it is, and I don’t mean online services ending. The game industry would need to figure out how to get rid of piracy entirely but as it stands I can find a copy of this game on archive.
But I keep being told the trillionaire corporation steam is 100% ethical and good guys and that the billionaire Gabe is OUR billionaire and loves us!!
It’s unlikely Valve forced the game off the page. Even so, the supposed issue has always been if Steam were to pull games from you that are already in your library (which AFAIK they haven’t) or a future hypothetical where Steam closes down and if people would be able to offline save their libraries.
If this had happened on ps5 you’d all be blaming Sony
The original version of Crysis is available right now on GOG and the EA store. PC isn’t a single vendor ecosystem where the only store also owns the hardware to play it.
We also don’t know who decided to pull it. I’d still wager it is unlikely Valve made a unilateral choice or pressured the game off the platform. Look at EA for answers.
If there was no alternative, and debatably superior, version of the game currently available then this might be an issue. But there is, so the preservation of the IP is hardly jeopardized.
It’s not about the IP. It’s about the actual piece of work.
Imagine if I drew a new version of the Mona Lisa, and they destroyed the original to display mine instead.
They could use the old one as a placemat to protect a table from having soup spilled on it.
The comparison is more akin to how they have actually restored the mona lisa with chemical and color correction as a means to make it withstand the test of time. Thats essentially what has happened with the remastered version of this game.
I understand that in other instances, remasters and remakes might as well be a different game, but if you have played crysis, this is barely the case.
Im not saying its fine to lose access to original data. All im saying is in this particular case, there isnt much loss to be outraged about. The publishers havent un-alived the IP. We have just lost access to some historical data.
I am all for preservation. I dont want to underplay the detriments of lost data. I just want to subjectively quantify this loss.
