Even when a game publisher goes out of business, someone buys up the assets of the company, even if it’s the bank they owed money to. Copyright laws are very clear about how long they last and who retains the rights.
The thing with copyright, unlike trademark, is that the owners don’t have to stop people from violating it to retain their rights. There’s no real benefit to a company trying to shut down the free distribution of 30-year-old software, so they don’t bother.
Originally it happened when the company that made the software went out of business.
Nowadays is that, and when the company simply decides to drop support altogether, usually after a merger or acquisition by a larger company that wants something else the first company made… or just parts of the original software.
You make a game for windows 95. No one uses windows 95 anymore. You have moved on and do not update the game to run on windows 11. The game has been abandoned.
Usually the company that created it goes out of business, and either no one purchases the rights to their old titles or they aren’t financially worth supporting. It can also mean that something that required a dedicated server becomes unprofitable and the company shuts them down.
In the old days abandonware just meant that people were passing around copies of games that were not available for purchase. Now it also includes people reverse engineering servers to replace functionality like multi-player that goes away when the company drops support.
Abandonware doesn’t have a formal definition, nor specific criteria which qualifies one game for it over another.
But the general idea is that a game becomes abandonware when it is no longer being sold or supported by it’s owner. If the only place I can buy a game is on the second-hand market then it is usually considered abandonware.
Generally through apathy. Once a product is released, it sells for a while. It might get patches for years in the modern day, but 20+ years ago, it was pretty rare for a two-year-old game to still get a patch. The team that built it has moved on to other things. The computers that held all the resources and the development environment are re-tasked to other projects. The data may still exist, but not in a format that can easily be worked on. Some of the data may just be misplaced in poorly-labeled archives/backups, or it may be destroyed (through neglect or in the really old days, through a desire to recover the drive).
It was common for the suits not to want to allocate any person-hours to the task of archiving all the elements that are used to build the finished product, so it just gets lost.
Generally the term “abandonware” is used by the community to refer to a product that isn’t being maintained (or possibly even sold) in any way by the owner of the product. It’s possible that the ownership isn’t even definitively known because the studio that developed the product, or the publisher that funded the studio’s development of the product, went bankrupt, were acquired, split up, merged, or otherwise changed hands in a way that makes the ownership murky. At that point, it’s still not legal to distribute that product (at least not under most jurisdictions’ copyright laws), but it’s also not something that the owners are actively shutting down because the owners may not even realize they own that product.
Abandonware is when a software’s creator/developer/publisher is no longer in business and so there is no longer support nor is it available for purchase anywhere. Trying to get information on these products are often in the hands of past users, or fans.
Completed games exist as Abandonware especially those that came in the gaming boom of the ’90s and early 2000s whose publishers closed years later.
There’s a multitude of ways this can happen. With older games on physical media, it could simply be that there aren’t many copies that have survived, and this is even more prevalent with proprietary formats (cartridges, UMDs, non-standard flash cards) that are difficult or in some cases even impossible to rip for preservation and emulation.
The more relevant example we see today though is games that may depend on an online component in order to function, and the servers powering that online component simply don’t exist anymore. This could be something as simple as a license-key checker, or it could relate to more significant components within the game such as multiplayer functionality.
Another issue that affects older games is that sometimes they have dependencies that haven’t been recompiled to function properly on modern operating systems, or may make use of certain hardware features and extensions that have since been deprecated.
A game is colloquially deemed “abandoned” when one or more of the following apply:
It’s no longer updated
It’s no longer supported
The platform it’s designed for is deemed obsolete
It’s no longer available for purchase outside the second hand market
The developers/publishers/rights holders disband, go out of business, are deceased etc
The rights have changed hands so many times no one is sure who owns them anymore
Abandonware isn’t a real thing in law. It’s essentially a gamble that the software is so old that the rights holder is unlikely/unwilling/unable to pursue a copyright infringement case.
Copyright is only as good as its enforcement (hence why Nintendo sues the pants of anyone hosting roms, even on software they don’t distribute legally). As others have pointed out when a company dissolves, bankrupts or merges the copyright doesn’t vanish however the resources or will to pursue the enforcement does (at least in the case the first two for the most part as it’s expensive, or the people who own the copyright don’t care). Source: copyright law lecture years ago, it’s why large companies have gargantuan legal departments which clear everything and litigate so hard otherwise their property and therefore the company loose their value.
To answer your question regarding loosing software, from interviews I’ve seen with developers a lot of the time when a company dissolved so did the infrastructure with it including the hardware storing production material (this was erased to be resold or simply thrown out) or the master copies are with the publisher of the day, I have seen some developers talk about how they have a copy somewhere in storage or production materials, but much like an old job you worked 30 years ago – you probably don’t hold on to too much. And media degrades. The software that does survive is usually uploaded by enthusiasts who have held onto the original media and/or managed to emulate it.
Abandonware means that the company that made it no longer sell it or support it, and have no interest in doing so in the future. Maybe the company is out of business, or maybe they just don’t think the amount of money it would take to rerelease the game (older games likely need updating to work on modern systems) would be more than they would get from new sales.
Of course things can seem like abandonware but then not be. For example Nintendo did nothing with their old NES library for ages until they realized they could use emulators to cheaply rerelease NES games on new consoles. Or old DOS games sold with DOSBox on Steam.
If the last owner of the IP literally throws their hands up and refuses to maintain their ownership of it, that’s how you get it. This isn’t the same as if a big publisher buys the IP and does nothing with it. It basically means the owner either couldn’t sell or did not wish to sell the right and then refused to protect them. That being said, there is no written document they sign, so if you pirate a game you thought was abandonware and the owner suddenly starts exercising the rights or sells to someone who will, you are not going to be able to claim it was okay.
I think the community treats games as “abandonware” when they can no longer be legally purchased, except possibly second-hand. This could be due to murky/disputed ownership, or owners of the rights that aren’t willing or able to put in the effort to make it available.
When games are in that state, where there is no legal way to get them, there’s much less risk of any copyright enforcement action. If there’s no one actually still selling a game, there’s no incentive for anyone to try to go after people sharing it.
A few ways it can happen: income from the game no longer justifies the cost of providing servers and updates, the company that made the game goes out of business, the company that made the game gets bought and the people assigned to something else the company thinks will be more profitable, the game IP gets sold to some company that has no interest in maintaining it, etc.
A lot of the comments are giving good answers for the general sense, ie making a game for Windows 95 or a company going bust. However there are instances when even huge companies eventually end up producing abandonware, even for games that run on modern systems. Manhunt 2 is a really good example; it was made by Rockstar, the same people that made the GTA games, Bully, L.A Noire, Red Dead Redemption… Manhunt 2 was so violent that they eventually decided they wanted to stop selling the game and decided to bury it because of the backlash iirc. You will never see any Manhunt 2 materials on official Rockstar sources (website, social media, etc). You can’t buy the game as it was pulled from all stores, even online digital ones. It’s as if it never even existed, because Rockstar (imo, wrongly) is ashamed of its existence
Anecdote time! Originally FF7 was a title meant for a completely different game! A completely different universe was optioned and storyboarded, but was deemed too dark for the franchise. So the OG story was released under the name Xenogears and a newer (slightly) less dark story was swapped in. Go play it and you’ll see first hand what abandonment looks like: extremely low-res place holder sprites that were never replaced, an in-depth and dramatic storyline spanning millenia involving reincarnation, giant robots, god, nanotechnology, space travel… (way too much to talk about here) with well thought out dialog, an immersive (for its time) open world, a complicated combat system that can be swapped between 3rd person and giant robot mode (as well as street fighter type mini game that could be a solo game by itself)! and all that abruptly ends at the second disk… because that’s where the funding ended. The game becomes a slide show with an empty end-game overworld except for the last dungeon. Square-Soft did this game WAY dirty and I don’t know if I can ever forgive them…
It usually refers to games where no company has any financial interest in the games anymore. Either because they’ve gone out of business or because they no longer maintain and sell the game or run infrastructure for it.
The first makes abandonware pretty simple, as there’s not really anyone to sue.
The second option is more complex as the company still has an interest in the IP and could use, even if they’re not making money off the game itself
Comments
It doesn’t.
Legally there is no such thing as abandonware.
Even when a game publisher goes out of business,
someone buys up the assets of the company, even if it’s the bank they owed money to. Copyright laws are very clear about how long they last and who retains the rights.
The thing with copyright, unlike trademark, is that the owners don’t have to stop people from violating it to retain their rights. There’s no real benefit to a company trying to shut down the free distribution of 30-year-old software, so they don’t bother.
Originally it happened when the company that made the software went out of business.
Nowadays is that, and when the company simply decides to drop support altogether, usually after a merger or acquisition by a larger company that wants something else the first company made… or just parts of the original software.
You make a game for windows 95. No one uses windows 95 anymore. You have moved on and do not update the game to run on windows 11. The game has been abandoned.
Usually the company that created it goes out of business, and either no one purchases the rights to their old titles or they aren’t financially worth supporting. It can also mean that something that required a dedicated server becomes unprofitable and the company shuts them down.
In the old days abandonware just meant that people were passing around copies of games that were not available for purchase. Now it also includes people reverse engineering servers to replace functionality like multi-player that goes away when the company drops support.
Abandonware doesn’t have a formal definition, nor specific criteria which qualifies one game for it over another.
But the general idea is that a game becomes abandonware when it is no longer being sold or supported by it’s owner. If the only place I can buy a game is on the second-hand market then it is usually considered abandonware.
Generally through apathy. Once a product is released, it sells for a while. It might get patches for years in the modern day, but 20+ years ago, it was pretty rare for a two-year-old game to still get a patch. The team that built it has moved on to other things. The computers that held all the resources and the development environment are re-tasked to other projects. The data may still exist, but not in a format that can easily be worked on. Some of the data may just be misplaced in poorly-labeled archives/backups, or it may be destroyed (through neglect or in the really old days, through a desire to recover the drive).
It was common for the suits not to want to allocate any person-hours to the task of archiving all the elements that are used to build the finished product, so it just gets lost.
Generally the term “abandonware” is used by the community to refer to a product that isn’t being maintained (or possibly even sold) in any way by the owner of the product. It’s possible that the ownership isn’t even definitively known because the studio that developed the product, or the publisher that funded the studio’s development of the product, went bankrupt, were acquired, split up, merged, or otherwise changed hands in a way that makes the ownership murky. At that point, it’s still not legal to distribute that product (at least not under most jurisdictions’ copyright laws), but it’s also not something that the owners are actively shutting down because the owners may not even realize they own that product.
Abandonware is when a software’s creator/developer/publisher is no longer in business and so there is no longer support nor is it available for purchase anywhere. Trying to get information on these products are often in the hands of past users, or fans.
Completed games exist as Abandonware especially those that came in the gaming boom of the ’90s and early 2000s whose publishers closed years later.
There’s a multitude of ways this can happen. With older games on physical media, it could simply be that there aren’t many copies that have survived, and this is even more prevalent with proprietary formats (cartridges, UMDs, non-standard flash cards) that are difficult or in some cases even impossible to rip for preservation and emulation.
The more relevant example we see today though is games that may depend on an online component in order to function, and the servers powering that online component simply don’t exist anymore. This could be something as simple as a license-key checker, or it could relate to more significant components within the game such as multiplayer functionality.
Another issue that affects older games is that sometimes they have dependencies that haven’t been recompiled to function properly on modern operating systems, or may make use of certain hardware features and extensions that have since been deprecated.
A game is colloquially deemed “abandoned” when one or more of the following apply:
Abandonware isn’t a real thing in law. It’s essentially a gamble that the software is so old that the rights holder is unlikely/unwilling/unable to pursue a copyright infringement case.
Copyright is only as good as its enforcement (hence why Nintendo sues the pants of anyone hosting roms, even on software they don’t distribute legally). As others have pointed out when a company dissolves, bankrupts or merges the copyright doesn’t vanish however the resources or will to pursue the enforcement does (at least in the case the first two for the most part as it’s expensive, or the people who own the copyright don’t care). Source: copyright law lecture years ago, it’s why large companies have gargantuan legal departments which clear everything and litigate so hard otherwise their property and therefore the company loose their value.
To answer your question regarding loosing software, from interviews I’ve seen with developers a lot of the time when a company dissolved so did the infrastructure with it including the hardware storing production material (this was erased to be resold or simply thrown out) or the master copies are with the publisher of the day, I have seen some developers talk about how they have a copy somewhere in storage or production materials, but much like an old job you worked 30 years ago – you probably don’t hold on to too much. And media degrades. The software that does survive is usually uploaded by enthusiasts who have held onto the original media and/or managed to emulate it.
Abandonware means that the company that made it no longer sell it or support it, and have no interest in doing so in the future. Maybe the company is out of business, or maybe they just don’t think the amount of money it would take to rerelease the game (older games likely need updating to work on modern systems) would be more than they would get from new sales.
Of course things can seem like abandonware but then not be. For example Nintendo did nothing with their old NES library for ages until they realized they could use emulators to cheaply rerelease NES games on new consoles. Or old DOS games sold with DOSBox on Steam.
If the last owner of the IP literally throws their hands up and refuses to maintain their ownership of it, that’s how you get it. This isn’t the same as if a big publisher buys the IP and does nothing with it. It basically means the owner either couldn’t sell or did not wish to sell the right and then refused to protect them. That being said, there is no written document they sign, so if you pirate a game you thought was abandonware and the owner suddenly starts exercising the rights or sells to someone who will, you are not going to be able to claim it was okay.
I think the community treats games as “abandonware” when they can no longer be legally purchased, except possibly second-hand. This could be due to murky/disputed ownership, or owners of the rights that aren’t willing or able to put in the effort to make it available.
When games are in that state, where there is no legal way to get them, there’s much less risk of any copyright enforcement action. If there’s no one actually still selling a game, there’s no incentive for anyone to try to go after people sharing it.
A few ways it can happen: income from the game no longer justifies the cost of providing servers and updates, the company that made the game goes out of business, the company that made the game gets bought and the people assigned to something else the company thinks will be more profitable, the game IP gets sold to some company that has no interest in maintaining it, etc.
A lot of the comments are giving good answers for the general sense, ie making a game for Windows 95 or a company going bust. However there are instances when even huge companies eventually end up producing abandonware, even for games that run on modern systems. Manhunt 2 is a really good example; it was made by Rockstar, the same people that made the GTA games, Bully, L.A Noire, Red Dead Redemption… Manhunt 2 was so violent that they eventually decided they wanted to stop selling the game and decided to bury it because of the backlash iirc. You will never see any Manhunt 2 materials on official Rockstar sources (website, social media, etc). You can’t buy the game as it was pulled from all stores, even online digital ones. It’s as if it never even existed, because Rockstar (imo, wrongly) is ashamed of its existence
Anecdote time! Originally FF7 was a title meant for a completely different game! A completely different universe was optioned and storyboarded, but was deemed too dark for the franchise. So the OG story was released under the name Xenogears and a newer (slightly) less dark story was swapped in. Go play it and you’ll see first hand what abandonment looks like: extremely low-res place holder sprites that were never replaced, an in-depth and dramatic storyline spanning millenia involving reincarnation, giant robots, god, nanotechnology, space travel… (way too much to talk about here) with well thought out dialog, an immersive (for its time) open world, a complicated combat system that can be swapped between 3rd person and giant robot mode (as well as street fighter type mini game that could be a solo game by itself)! and all that abruptly ends at the second disk… because that’s where the funding ended. The game becomes a slide show with an empty end-game overworld except for the last dungeon. Square-Soft did this game WAY dirty and I don’t know if I can ever forgive them…
It usually refers to games where no company has any financial interest in the games anymore. Either because they’ve gone out of business or because they no longer maintain and sell the game or run infrastructure for it.
The first makes abandonware pretty simple, as there’s not really anyone to sue.
The second option is more complex as the company still has an interest in the IP and could use, even if they’re not making money off the game itself