John Carmack Has Some Great Advice About Games Preservation - Kotaku

It’s a problem that Carmack recently addressed, sending a lengthy statement to UploadVR last week that covers all kinds of angles surrounding Echo VR’s shutdown.

The stuff I’m mostly interested in, though, are all the bits about how it’s important for studios to keep old games alive, and that cost and manpower shouldn’t be the only things they’re thinking about when making those decisions.

“Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others.”

Of course, his experience with this stuff is largely built on his time at id Software, whose older games—like Doom and Quake —were slightly more popular than some random VR game with only a few thousand users.

If you can support some level of LAN play for a multiplayer game, the door is at least open for people to write proxies in the future.

Supporting user-run servers as an option can actually save on hosting costs, and also opens up various community creative avenues.