why do movies get reprinted constantly and you can go buy a brand new copy of that obscure movie from the 90s on dvd for $cheap but video games get one or two runs and then that's it, never reprinted ever
i guess i kind of get it for cartridges what with the specialized tooling but like, why don't they reprint ps2 games? they're literally just dvds with data on them
why are video games so different than home video in this respect
@Felthry Square Enix used to sell new copies of Final Fantasy games for the PSX (though on silver CDs) but I guess now they want people to play the remakes or w/e
@noiob Huh, did they? For how long?
@noiob okay that's impressive and good, well done square
now if only other companies did that too
@Felthry that's capitalism for ya
@Felthry 1. the game industry doesn't value preservation in the same way
2. games are harder to re-release than movies, even if they're for the original hardware rather than a port
if you want to re-release a PS1 game, you have to find CD burners that can still write the special pattern on the disc used for copy protection
the dreamcast's gd-roms don't exist anymore as a format, and Nintendo's GC/Wii/Wii U discs are proprietary
@Felthry and there's no guarantees on that original hardware still working either
(cartridges are harder to produce generally, but for the NES, SNES, MD, GB, and maybe N64 at least, patents governing the system hardware and/or copy protection have expired).
3. if ported, there are a lot of costs added - getting it to run on (all variations of) new hardware, changing the buttons to the new console, removing/changing any console specific references in text
@Dex Aren't commercial CDs and DVDs pressed, not burned?
And the equipment for making PS1 games must still exist, because someone else pointed out in response to this that Square Enix is still selling new copies of Final Fantasy Anthology for the PS1
I thought gamecube and wii discs were just DVDs? Possibly with some slightly different data structures but the same actual technology.
@Felthry Yes, they are, I forgot the word.
Are those new copies, or are they new old stock, is the question.
GC and Wii discs are similar to DVDs, but do not meet the DVD standard (subsequently Nintendo pay no licensing fees to the DVD consortium), do not read in standard DVD drives and have a special ring of information on them for copy protection.
They are similar enough that Wii homebrew lets you play regular DVDs though.
@Dex Well, being able to press the discs means that you don't need any special hardware to make them, at least, because if you have the masters, you can just copy the discs physically without regard to the data on them.
And huh, I didn't know they wouldn't read in standard dvd drives. Guess they must be harder to rip than I'd thought
@Felthry Under normal circumstances, that would be the case, that the data matters and not the physical disc.
However (this is half remembered & I'm on mobile), the PS1's copy protection works by writing to and reading from an area of the CD that isn't defined as part of the standard and so normally ignored. Consumer CD burners can't write that, commercial presses would need to be reconfigured. Without that physical information (or something to bypass it), it won't be recognised as a PS1 disc.
this is why a lot of video game piracy exists: it's just not possible to buy a lot of these harder to find ones through legal channels that don't cost like $300 and give you a possibly damaged copy of the game