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[nkarafo]

Seeing how much money some prototypes and builds of old cancelled games cost (if found in a physical form) i wonder. Do current developers take notes?

I assume there was no way for developers back in the day to know that sometime there would be a huge market for retro games where such prototypes, dev kits, demo carts, etc are considered the holy grail and people will be willing to pay a ton of money for them. That's why so many prototypes of very old games are found by luck in some basement, attic, forgotten shelf or someone's box of thing he wants to get rid of. Pretty sure nobody walking around that useless SNES CD console prototype back in the day ever thought it would be so valuable one day.

But, it's been some time now that everyone knows better. So i wonder if current devs are backing up stuff for themselves, keeping discs of early builds of games of uncertain future or save things from destruction, etc. Knowing that they will probably cost a lot of money in a couple of decades.

I understand that nowadays this is a harder task since most stuff is in digital form but i have a feeling that, in 20 years from now, we are going to see a lot of unseen stuff from PS3/360/Wii/DS, etc, being sold from retired developers.

 

[ParaSeoul]

That stuff is probably still out there in some warehouse waiting to be found. Its not uncommon to see ideas from scrapped projects be reused in future games.

 

[AndrewRyan]

When a project is cancelled many will make backups to preserve their work. Problem is no one will share due to fear of getting sued.