Activision has misplaced its Transformer games, says Hasbro

www.gamesindustry.biz

This is where the argument that piracy is also preserving games stands up. Although, it begs the question why games developers do not properly archive their software.

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I have an iso if they need it
- it's a trap!
- Archive.org anyone?
  
  They've been comin in clutch recently with the mirrors lol
  God save the Archive Foundation, or donate to their legal fees if you wanna keep around for real.
Watch it get found by an employee in a personal backup and then later get fired (like what happened with Toy Story 2) or get into trouble for "inappropriate copying of company property" or something similiar
- I mean, the woman who had the toy story 2 backup did get fired like 25 years later. That is a quarter of a century.
  
  For the rest of the world that's equal to 10 kg
  
  She was also the producer for Lightyear, which imo was not a very good movie.
  
  But but but UFOs.
- Wait, she was fired like over 20 years later. How are those events even connected?
  
  Yeah. I mean credit where credit is due, but saving a project once doesn't give you a lifetime get out of future screwups pass. It might give you leniency on the next few projects you worked on, but it's been years at this point.
- But thats not the reason she was fired though.
As much as there's an Activision fuckup here, there's also a Hasbro fuckup. When you do a deal like this with a publisher, part of that agreement should include provisions for the source code - either directly sending it or if Activision didn't want to share its proprietary code, indirectly via an Escrow service.
Unless there is a financial incentive to do so the costs to archive might be too high unfortunately, especially given the circumstances of the previous merger/acquisitions and licensing, the people responsible for the data were “right” to no longer bare the cost. It’s unlikely there is a physical hard drive of this stuff and even if it was then the hard drive could even have been repurposed or reclaimed. These are businesses at the end of the day and once the product ships, unless they own the IP there’s no reason to keep the data. Hell it could have even been in the contract to delete any Hasbro data after the license expired, and Hasbro never kept a copy themselves.
Culturally, and for the sake of a game library archive pirates are picking up the slack where elsewhere there are non-profit or government bodies responsible for archiving like the National Film Registry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry
- It costs penny on the dollar to archive the final code base of these games.
  Saying it's fine is like saying a artist shouldn't keep copies of their work on the wall because there's no money it's it.
  Companies should have pride in their accomplishments. These companies only care about profitability, and care nothing about what they have done in the past unless it makes them more money. It's why modern gaming feels soulless.
  
  I would personally keep the source code for any game I made, and if I can personally afford that, then these companies can.
  
  Plus you need it in copyright lawsuits to prove someone copied your work.
- Yeah. The upside is Microsoft might have incentive in extra stuff to prop up game pass, depending on cost. They will probably want an accounting at some point of all properties that can be accessible to know what they can and can't easily use to put on there, and what can be done with reasonable enough investment.
I would laugh. I'd be surprised there isn't a backup of old source control somewhere and the same backup if done well would have the assets too. But, I will preface this with. Non gaming software that no-one would ever want to use again. Maybe a museum would want it.
But I suspect the only surviving version (if it's even on the drive) survives in the attic of my old house (family still live there, I didn't just abandon it in a sold house). A very very old version of non gaming software on a hard drive of an old 90s unix system.
So, you know it's not that surprising. Depending on how old the games are.
Should have asked for source. I still have war for cybertron on my steam account, recently noticed it has dissapeared of the store
- Shouldn't Steam still have copies of the files?
Does that include the Transformers game from Platinum Games? I remember having so much fun with that.
This is why I've been amassing a collection of PS3 games. So many interesting games. They may not always be good but if they can't be found on PC then I'll get them. I don't even care that much for some of them like Splatterhouse. Not a game I'd even heard of until I saw it and then I was even more surprised to find out it was a remake. Regardless, it satisfied my criteria so into my hard drive it goes.

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