Calling something "art" doesn't magically make it immune to decay.

Paintings have to be restored, books have to be reprinted.

If your art is so cherished to you and other people then surely that should give you even more motivation to spend time ensuring that it is preserved into the future, no?

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

Try to remember that you're talking about a video game that's considered abandoned, and that the author is allowed to re-upload it to keep it up

This is actually because the author doesn't want to do small labor, not because people are being silenced or murdered

I, as my others, tried to explain that this is not small labor. Please read the many comments related to this post before making such a incorrect statement.

If majority of games won't be around in 10-20 years, then it's a pretty good analogy of the parent post.

> I, as my others, tried to explain that this is not small labor.

The phrase "small labor" has a legal meaning. This is not a colloquial attempt to describe the workload as small.

However, also, as an author of unity iOS software who's gone through this, I do think the amount of labor being described here is pretty over the top.

Even in an extreme case I would only expect dep upgrades to take a couple days.

I've read the many comments, thanks. It's just that I don't really agree with them.

As both a developer who's been through this, and as a user, like many other people in this comment thread, I agree with this policy. I believe that abandonware doesn't really belong in store. It makes it much harder for me to use my phone, that every time I want to do task X, I can't find an app for ten minutes because I'm digging through all the shovelware.

I also don't see any moral imperative to keep games available, frankly. To me it seems like insisting that every board game ever printed should still be on sale somewhere.

I think that if people feel the need to compare this to murder and political oppression, they're kind of ceding that if they describe it correctly, nobody's going to be angry.

In general, I treat invalid comparisons to war crimes as a warning sign, internally.

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> If majority of games won't be around in 10-20 years, then it's a pretty good analogy of the parent post.

This has always been the case with computer games.

Try to dig up some 2600 or Colecovision games. I'll wait.

I don’t believe any game/app that was/is available on one or two of many hand held computing devices is worth much “labor” from the maintainers of said game’s/app’s operating environment. I think it’s kind of hilarious to think that ANY application written to be run on a mobile device is so important that it should run forever or even X amount of time without adhering to the constraints of the runtime environment. Humanity NEEDS access to my iOS 1.0 minesweeper because <misplaced _software_ideology>

The game could easily rely on functionality that is no longer available. It may now violate some new content guideline. Either would have the effect of silencing them.

The author will eventually die, and then their work will either be modified without their oversight or deleted from the archives.

As the quote says, the problem extends beyond just video games.

What no longer available functionality, specifically, should be in the store? That story does not make sense

What things against content guidelines should still be in store? That story does not make sense

Oh no, a store doesn't carry a video game for all eternity, past an author's death? Oh no. Since Apple is the country's archivist, the phone store should probably carry every single app ever written for all time. Screw the user experience, Apple's obligation is to the author of Lizard Pong

There is no problem

He has to be alive to do that.

The poster of the article is alive, as is the person I'm talking to

They only comparable decay is bit rot.

"because it is perfect and a piece of art."

I have never seen a perfect app or a piece of art in the App Store.

Apple isn't running an art gallery, besides. If it's a piece of art, it belongs in MOMA.

I don't understand why everyone's saying "this store can't keep abandoned stuff out because they're capital-A Art."

You know how some guy makes a painting, and he thinks it's really good, so he takes it to a gallery, and they go "we're not interested," and he starts yelling about all the study he did, and it's Art, and how dare they?

They're running a business, dude, and almost everyone who says "I'm making art" isn't

Art is super rare.

I can only think of maybe half a dozen games in all of history that I personally believe have earned that title. Maybe two dozen films, and they've been around a lot longer.

Before you start arguing that everything little Billy makes with fingerpaint is culturally important art, ask yourself one question: where are all the legitimate art museums declaring games art? As far as I know, that list starts and stops with the 2012 Smithsonian exhibit where they let the population vote and then didn't hold anything physical at the building ever.

Have you ever considered that nobody goes to the Library of Congress, for anything? Have you ever considered that cramming the record with every insignificant thought ever thunk might actually be counterproductive?

Are we really so much worse off to be missing one romance poem from Lebanon in the Bronze Age?

Do you genuinely believe that archaeologists, a thousand years from now, will be studying Hotel Mario, Sonic Boom, or Ninjabread Man?

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"Why don't they have better options for discovery, rather than saying "old is bad"."

They aren't saying "old is bad." They're saying "unmaintained is bad."

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> Releasing a new version sounds easy, but it's a significant time effort (chain of dependencies, build environments and game engines are complex)

I dunno. One guy got Quake 2 up and running under the browser in Emscripten in three days.

I have a hard time understanding why everyone is acting like pressing the build button can be tragically difficult, but also, their software is perfect art. Being unable to build is a pretty big red flag

I know, I know, "old Unity." That's because it was left unmaintained for years, though.

I lost two apps this way. I think that was the right thing for Apple's users.

I think that Apple should be more focused on the users than the developers.

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"Apple logic makes zero sense, it's like destroying books or paintings and stuff."

If a bookstore stops selling a book, do you believe the book is destroyed?

If I write a book and only release it on the Kindle, and then five years later Kindle requires PDF instead of ePub, and I don't want to put in the effort to convert, has Amazon somehow harmed me?

Is it relevant that you can un-destroy the game by just recompiling it and pushing a new build?

Is it relevant that you can release your game on other platforms?

I guess I feel like there's a whole lot of misrepresentation happening here.

They're not destroying anything. They're giving you 30 days' notice to show that you're still maintaining the app, and then it stays up.

"They're giving you 30 days' notice to show that you're still maintaining the app, and then it stays up."

Which would have been more than enough time... if the app had in fact been maintained.

And which doesn't change the fact that the developer agreement clearly states that apps must stay current and maintain compatibility.