In reply to Chuck.

Yeah, Telltale was on my mind, too. That early policy of “if you buy digitally directly from us, you can get the physical disc for mostly just shipping costs” was somewhat unique and which games I failed to do that on is an interesting set as is the set of games after that policy ended.

I was also thinking about GameTap. That was one of their pitches as a “TV channel for games” that they had a long term interest in archival because you can’t syndicate or reschedule TV shows you failed to archive, or games in GameTap’s case. They didn’t live long term enough to make good on some of those long term archival goals. Modern successors like Xbox Game Pass don’t have any such goals in their public marketing at all.

That last part has even been relevant in some of the controversial discussions about Mixtape. Mixtape is a recent “indie” single player game with the needle drop budget of an expensive film. Its publisher is Annapurna which is a large film studio (Megan Ellison’s) so that kind of checks out. Annnapurna claims they licensed those needle drops for a long enough time no one should worry about the game delisting anytime soon, but between Annapurna’s previous controversies (hiring a known sex pest to [again] lead the games group causing a massive walkout of a key group of videogame producers that had helped publish award winning games, some of which got delisted after the walkout) and the Xbox Game Pass exclusivity gave Mixtape so much of an impression of being one of the one-season Netflix shows designed to win a lot of awards season buzz and likely to be delisted a year or two later. A lot of people think Mixtape was a “designed to be delisted” game. I enjoyed it, but it was just edgy enough (with an expensive enough soundtrack) I could see it getting awards, and yet also just bland enough to be a forgettable binge watch, I’ll forget about as soon as it leaves game pass, so I can definitely appreciate why some of controversies about the game got so loud. (The other controversies, beyond the music budget and the publisher, are accusations of heavy AI usage in art and development and the implication that for a game built on 90s nostalgia it may not have had developers who actually lived through the 90s, such as a cassette minigame that violates the real world physics of how a cassette worked.)

I realize with Netflix being an easy target for that analogy and also thinking about Spotify some of the archival problems are becoming a concern again in music and film. It’s not just single player games, unfortunately.