08-27-2018, 08:17 PM
I blogged about this on Tumblr earlier; let me post a snippet that I think best summarizes my feelings on why this is a bad sign all around...
Quote:I’m under no assumption that Essentials has been erased from the face of the Internet; within just hours, I had several people on one of my Discord servers uploading their copies of Essentials to Google Drive to help redistribute it, while a couple other people found cached pages of the Essentials Wikia and started downloading and archiving them. So it’s not dead by any means, just pushed yet further underground.
But the loss of resources like ROMs and Pokemon Essentials (or if not a total loss, just being made harder to find) do more than cut off fangames; indie video game development will no doubt start to suffer due to this. Consider how invaluable fangame creation is toward helping the next generation of software engineers learn how to design and program their own games. The love of a favorite video game has inspired so many young people to pursue careers in coding and programming. If we deny today’s fangame developers the tools to make their dreams reality – even if they’re using someone else’s intellectual property to do it – we could very well be snuffing out the inspiration and drive that would have been responsible for tomorrow’s gaming sensation.
