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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>We firmly believe that removing fully functional artistic works simply due to infrequent updates undermines the value and sustainability of games as cultural and artistic products. Like books, films, and music albums, video games represent complete creative works that do not inherently require continual updates beyond maintaining basic functionality

Is the Apple app store there to provide that kind of perpetual access?

A book's perpetual existence is mostly because a physical copy exists, that's not really the same, nor is anyone assuring it still exists.

I do sympathize with the issue about requiring updates and etc, I ran into that with Google recently, but I'm not sure I buy into this idea that requiring updates shouldn't happen ever because "my game is like art and art doesn't require updates".

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It's a pretty sad trap to fall into. All of these games are doomed to fall out of support and never be played again if nobody maintains them. Consoles have emulators and PC games usually just keep working but what is the solution for the mobile games worth saving?

> Consoles have emulators

All of them written by hobbyists, without support from console manufacturers, isn’t it?

Is there anything that Apple does to prevent hobbyists from writing an iOS emulator? If so, do other manufacturers do better?

Nintendo does have their own emulators but only for a subset of games. Everything else is third party.

Apple probably doesn't try to prevent iOS apps from being emulated but the fact that it's a fast moving target makes it much less practical.

Why should they need maintenance? The only maintenance needed is because the OS has zero concern for backwards compatibility.

What do games need? A GL/vulkan context, audio system and user input. They really don't ask for much from the OS itself. It should be able to keep working because it's still doing the same thing. It wasn't broken because it had a bug, but it was broken because Apple decided to break it (and lots of other useful, feature-complete apps). Sometimes, something is just "finished". It shouldn't need "maintaining" to keep running.

I agree. It's not practical to expect apps/games to be maintained forever. People stop working on things. Studios shut down. It's another reason why I think macOS wouldn't work out as a good games platform.

If they provided a plausible way to sideload then they'd be on stronger grounds. It's the same as Stop Killing Games. Apple shouldn't carry the burden of hosting forever, but equally they can't just make something disappear forever.

I'm not opposed to side loading in general, but the idea that side loading would work perpetually for old code also doesn't seem possible.

I used to think this but we have DOSBox, etc.

Even if something stopped working, that doesn’t mean it can never work again.

Apple aren’t obliged to keep the platform backwards compatible as long as they let people try to run their software.

If it allows the platforms to evolve and change without endless backwards compatibility .... I wouldn't be entirely opposed to "provide some effort with an emulator" not necessarily support for it, I could get behind that idea.

Apple should commit to a support life cycle on the front end then. You are being sold this product with support for a minimum of 'x' time frame. You are not 'buying' this.

Ideally what Stop Killing Games would like is game preservation, but at minimum we need honesty/transparency about product market places. I finally know what my minimum OS lifecycle is for my Pixel phone, and I can make a comfortable purchase decision based on that.

Even Steam isn't immune to this, it simply has an good track record relative compared to most other platforms.

Apple took a ~30% cut of the sale of the product. That should calculate into it's servicing of the product. To Ross Scott's points (and many others), if you have a perpetual service but a onetime/lifetime payment, the business model will eventually not net out.

As a customer, yes. I own iOS games that I cannot play and frankly I think that sucks.

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