There are some games i would love the spend some big money in just to See the whole transformation from an idea to a finished game.
NDAs are an affront to human creativity - and the polar fucking opposite of what copyright is for.
Copyright explicitly exists to incentivize new works, for us. It’s an opportunity to make money. The modern concept of owning an idea is a perversion and a failure of that intent. Especially when it’s not the actual fucking artists in control!
Kiana Mai recently remarked “the thing I’m most proud of is NDA and will likely never see the light of day, ha ha.” I want to tell her: no, not haha. That’s horrible. It is a crime and you are a victim. Not “the victim,” because there must be a whole goddamn team of you, and you’ve been robbed even if you were paid. Sadly relevant word: if.
Are those artwork stored as regular files in your game content (e.g. PNG) or embedded in the game? If the former, I wonder if there’s some way to integrate with Plex to autocrawl from steam/game folder, then index based on a public game metadata source (which wouldn’t legally be able to host the content, but metadata is fine right?)
I love the idea! In my own very anecdotal experience I feel the vast majority of the time they’re packed into asset files you’d probably need some sort of tool to extract.
Not that I think it’s impossible, I reckon there’d be some predictability between games sharing the same engine and such, maybe it’s feasible to some degree.
I feel a metadata site could include the hashes of the images to make the extracting easy (then you just need to crawl your game files for common files like png/jpg/mp4, then only “import” it if it matches the hashes of the metadata site.
Obviously, this would require a good community effort for indexing this. Maybe the original authors could create their own profiles and indicate which games they participated in (and the rest could be handled by fans/game enthusiasts)?