Six major challenges to game preservation for indies

In Gamasutra's latest feature, two indie developers -- Dejobaan's Ichiro Lambe and Bigpants' Jim McGinley -- share what they consider the three biggest hurdles to indies preserving their work for the future. As his previous articles on the topic for Gamasutra show -- check here or here -- preserving games for the future is tough for major publishers and developers... but what about indies? Do small team sizes and (mostly) contemporary technology help? Yes, but there are other problems. Jim McGinley of Bigpants games offers three reasons he thinks indies won't preserve their games adequately: 1. Staying organized. It's easy to create a lot of stuff, but hard to remember where it was put. 2. Games are increasingly part client, part server (FarmVille, World of Warcraft). Emulating this will be tricky. 3. Proprietary hardware (Wii controller, Kinect, PS3 motion controller). I'm expecting an avalanche of homemade controllers. Meanwhile, Dejobaan Games' Ichiro Lambe (pictured) has his own reasons: 1. Doom's always at our doorstep! (The concept of doom, not the game.) Game developers rarely have the luxury of anything but a focus on developing new stuff. 2. Technology moves ahead; old source isn't useful, and often isn't even readable with what we have now. What do I do with a cassette tape for a TI 99/4A? 3. Sometimes old code's just embarrassing. The full feature, which also contains comments from Kloonigames' Petri Purho, Playdead's Dino Patti, and more, is live now on Gamasutra.