Otome games and Lost media

[Hinakochan]

I recently realized that the mobile otome games I used to play are slowly but surely become lost medias.
I heard about a joseimuke yuri game that was online but not for long and now is lost forever.
One of my favorite mobile otome, The cinderella contract (Yuri my love I miss you ) shut down a year ago.
And I believe all the online, gacha otomes are bound to become lost media as companies don't care about us, they just want money.
I know some mobile games got a pc port or console port, like Forbidden romance (my first Japanese mobile otome btw lol)
But I feel like most games don't/won't get an offline port sadly.

What do you think about that and what us as a community can do to preserve the games and be able to live the stories again. No commentary walkthroughs are a solution but some of us might like actually playing the game better, and a lot of mobile otome have recording and updloading stories against their ToS.
NieR: Reincarnation is a good exemple of protecting games, and I was glad the community worked so hard to bring it back! (I love NieR!)

But I think it might not be as easy for every game, especially otome games. I think most of the content is server based and not client based, which makes an offline recreation of the games impossible, like Final fantasy 14 1.0.

Sorry for the yap, I just feel really sad about all that and wish we could do something about it.

 

[801_9ma]

The prevalence of ephemeral mobile games in the current gaming industry is basically my nemesis at this point.

It genuinely depresses me to know that I could get invested in a mobile game, only for it to later shut down and only have slim hopes of being preserved—the only times I got to experience some kind of preservation were because the developers themselves were like "hi guys, we're ending service but we're releasing an offline version post-EOS" (and usually, those offline versions are severely limited in terms of what you can actually do in them). It's come to the point where nowadays I just don't want to get into joseimuke mobile games because I know my taste enough to know that what I like tends to be stuff that quickly shuts down.

As for preservation attempts themselves... recreating the games in a playable state is a massive hurdle, yeah. That being said, if you know who to talk to, sometimes you can get links to unlisted YouTube playlists with recordings of some joseimuke games out there, so perhaps that includes mobile otome games too even if it technically goes against the game ToS. Of course that requires knowing who to talk to.

Ultimately, I'm not really bringing any solutions here, mostly commiserating. I hate how the mobile game format became the most profitable yet the most fragile. I just want to play games without worrying about losing them forever. :(