Personally and purely speaking for myself I have no problem with sharing Abandonware stuff, I used to love the Underdogs site and to this day am a member of number of communities where games (including Civ2) are passed around freely and am indeed a believer of retro game sharing to keep abandoned games alive and preserved. However by accepting the CFC moderating position I'm required to enforce this sites rules no matter what my personal opinion may be. Believe it or not it absolutely
pains me every time I have to do the above here as I realise I'm playing part in hurting Civ2 player base regrowth which is something I'm working hard to improve over the coming years by
getting the game back into stores and promoting mod content from this community all around the net. So doing something that partly sabotages my own dreams for this place is half killin me lol, but it also gives me all the more motivation to keep harassing 2K, GoG, Firaxis and other retro publishing companies to get the game back in stores again and solve this problem once and for all!
Personal feelings aside I understand why CivFanatics has the policy as let's face it, it's not alone and it's not new, as almost every major gaming website and community out there has the same rule on warez and abandonware for decades now as they're risk adverse and want to maintain good relationships with all the publishers. This site maintains a good relationship with Firaxis/2K and their people come here periodically to post and while it's extremely unlikely any of them would visit the old Civ2 section on their own accord, they are still occasionally at this site. Many 'abandoned' games actually do have owners (who sadly just neglect their property) and it's believed that 2K is 'most likely' the current owner of Civ2, so while they 'seemingly' don't care about it and therefore the odds of them caring about people sharing copies of Civ2 around are slim, as long as there's a chance of an issue then no one running this site is going to want to risk anything. Abandonware sites are still full of games that are actually for sale by their owners on Steam/GoG these days and keeping track of what games are truly abandoned, what are actually illegal warez, & which ones change from one to the other is of no interest to non-warez site owners so that's why it's easier for most gaming sites just to have a blanket 'No' rule on all abandonware games without exceptions.
Also I shouldn't say this as I've been asked not to say anything publicly but that risk of 2K coming here isn't quite as unlikely as it used to be as there are early discussions going on to get Civ2 back in stores. Whether those discussions actually succeed or not is a whole other matter, but they are happening, and may include links to
my vote threads here at CivFanatics. So if anyone from 2K visits the Civ2 area because of those links and the first thing they see at the top of the thread list are dudes sharing Abandonware links for Civ2 around then that's... not so good lol.
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