14 DAY TRIAL // Video games appear everyday, with very interesting titles flooding the average gamer and keeping him up to date with all the recent technology implemented in them. But caught in the middle of this rush of new titles, gamers often find themselves reminiscing of older titles that brought them hours upon hours of enjoyment years ago.
That is why services such as Steam or GoodOldGames (GOG) have always welcomed old titles into their portfolio and offered players the chance to buy new versions, updated to run on current-day PC configurations. We've seen a lot of companies bring their older properties here, and now fans expect more and more classic games to appear on such services.
Speaking on the subject, Capcom's Chris Svensson has revealed that, sadly, there are currently no plans to bring older titles, such as Resident Evil 1 through 3 or Mega Man Legends 1 and 2, to Steam or GOG because a lot of problems would pop up in the process, not to mention the issue of updating them to run on operating systems like Vista or Windows 7.
“No plans at this time,” Svensson says. “It seems like a brainlessly easy thing to do but there are other considerations like outstanding licensing agreements for voice overwork, musical scores, middleware or other components that could have lapsed. Titles need to be recleared legally, new contracts struck in some cases. On top of that there’s support costs for games that were never made to run on Vista or Windows 7 that we need to consider. As titles are created today, obviously these issues are taken into consideration. But 10 years ago, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.”
So it seems that gamers with a passion for older titles need to cross Capcom from the list of publishers that will bring older titles to them. Hopefully though, it will manage to bring such titles to consoles at least, in order to please those gamers.