Queer Games Preservation Society

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What is the problem:

Currently, queer games are in a renaissance where new games are coming out frequently. Most of these games are hosted on itch.io and other centralized sites. If anything happened to those sites large parts of queer games history would simply disappear forever.

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How we hope to fix this:

The queer games preservation group hopes to preserve queer games in a decentralized archive. Games will be preserved as BitTorrent downloads of original files that anyone with a BitTorrent client can download and seed keeping them online and available indefinitely.

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How can I help:

Simply download the torrents on our site and seed them. As more people seed, the file is more likely to remain online. You can do your part to preserve queer history just by running the BitTorrent client in the background of your pc.

If you are more technically savvy feel free to create a mirror of our site so that if our organization ever collapses the torrents will remain available. We encourage you to take our work and build your own queer games archive using these torrents.

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I'm a queer dev who would like my games to be preserved how does it work?

We will never archive queer developer's games without permission, we require the explicit consent of devs before we create a torrent.

To start email us at queergamesbundle@gmail.com with the game and files you would like to preserve letting us know we have permission to preserve your game. Afterward, we will create a torrent and add it to our seeder boxes that exist in multiple geographic locations. The torrent will then be available on our site where anyone can download it.

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Are there any downsides to being archived?

Once the torrent file is up as long as one person continues to seed, the files will remain available indefinitely. This means that once you consent to have your files archived and preserved it will be very difficult to revoke consent and have your files taken down. We can remove links to the torrent from our website but we can't stop other people from seeding it once it's out there.

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What games are allowed on the archive?

As long as the game is made by a queer person and is in a digital file format that can be archived, it belongs.

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Why would I want my games to be archived?

Life is short and unpredictable. If anything were to happen to you as a dev legally preserving your games until they enter the public domain becomes much more difficult. You would be leaving the survival of your work to chance. By participating in the archive we can formalize that preservation and increase the odds your work will survive into the future.

As game devs part of our goal is for people to play our works. I believe that for this reason, it is self-evident why you should consider allowing us to preserve them. Your work is worth preserving.