It's gradually come to my attention that some website owners/updaters regularly gauge themselves against other abandonware sites, and that they strive to be #1.

Should their be a competition? Is their no real progress without competition? And if competition is necessary, should their be a limit as to how far it goes?

That "I gotta be the best!" thing is too american. I couldn't care less about competing against others, I would preffer colaboration between abandonware pages, as that is a lot better for me, and also for other people, but mainly I care for me, as we are talking about these things, let be serious, we are working on a page like this for ourselves.

Because you won't get any fans, and even less feedback, and treating other pages as competitors (a thing I've seen others do) is like shooting yourself on the feet.

I would preffer a big abandonware forum or some kind of social page, or wathever is the latest fad, a place where collaborations could happen, not any kind of competition whose only point is making some feel bad for losing and a few feel the vapid glory of winning.

Well, there is certainly no denying that it was (perceived) competition which pushed some sites (and the associated people) to deliver some of their best in the past. On the other hand, there's also no denying that it was always hard for people (and I'm not excluding myself here) to keep that competition apart from the personal level which lead to lots of time being wasted in stupid flamewars.

To be honest, these days, I think we can be happy to have a handful of functional and actively maintained sites at all. This goes in both directions:

1. Those few sites seem to have different goals each, making competition unlikely, because there is nothing to measure and compare their success by.
2. There is little room for collaboration due to these different goals.

People have been talking about collaboration between sites basically since 'Abandonware' began. I've never really seen a workable suggestion above a glorified link exchange, though. So, Wandrell, what do you have in mind when you talk about collaboration?

In general, I do think a little more "I gotta be the best!" couldn't hurt. As long as the person saying that doesn't take it too seriously.

Well, I can't think any kind of collaboration between pages, but also each seems to be to their own things, so maybe we would need a place where everybody would discuss things.

But the simplest kind of collaboration would be a requests scheme. You want a review of a game in your page, then find me this other game I can't find anywhere, for example. One page makes a request, and another fulfills it in exchange for getting one of their request done.

That sounds good, but it implies there is an issue with game availability. Which I don't think exists anymore. Same for most other resources; server space, scripting support etc. are all widely available these days. The last time there was a central Abandonware forum, it wasn't so much because everybody liked the place, but because there were only two forums on the whole - nobody else had the ability to run any scripts!

I mean, maybe that's just me and my arrogance, but what could other people possible have to offer for TGOD? Reviews and screenshots sure. Apart from that, I consider us pretty self-sufficient, though. And everybody wants reviews and screenshots on their sites, so I doubt anyone would give those away to 'another' site. So there can't really be an exchange of 'goods'.

What we need are more floppies images, and those we get searching for them and getting them from people uploading in other places. Which reminds me I still have plenty of them waiting on my hard-drive, I hope next week I'll have time to add a few to the collection.

It's a fact of human nature that competition brings out one's best efforts. Most of our modern technology evolved from things which were originally invented for war. If it weren't for hitler & WWII, we might never have gone to space/created satelites, nor invented computers. Even if we eventually did, we'd be decades less developed than we are now.

I've been compared to Hitler before, I can take it

Yeah, but this same technology appears to be giving us cancer and making us less happy. Not that I believe technology is inherently evil, just that there are a lot of cavemen using it, and we're not smart enough to use it without destroying ourselves.

I agree with Cypherswipe and I think this is one of the many reasons why the scene has died. Before people were fighting to see who had the most games and the most visitors. Without competition what's left to keep you motivated other than nostalgia?

The scene died when people who weren't collectors, but simply downloaded zip files from other websites to put it on theirs became the majority. These days, the problem rather seems to be that people think technology alone will solve everything and make them famous. Disregarding that hard personal work is necessary, too, because... *choke* websites don't run themselves after all.

I don't think most website's owners were collectors but had some special memories of their past and wanted to share that with others. I guess in a way they lost interest and can even say "grew older" with responsibilities and just doesn't have the time to be bother with games anymore.

As long as there are people like you sharing all this stuff new people will come and go creating and sharing more site with us.