User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-24894325-20180907002807/@comment-188432-20181006185800

User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-24894325-20180907002807/@comment-188432-20181006185800 Another thing we have to be on guard against with a game that has no physical media is the likelihood that it will change. A realistic scenario is this. Tiny Rebel Games release "The Lady of the Lake" this year. Three years from now, the game is still active, but now the platform has changed. So they push an automatic update which switches it to a new format whereby you can now select different companions to go on different parts of the adventure. But because there is no physical media, no one can verify what the original storyline was.

Stuff like this happens more or less 100% of the time in the gaming world. Every game that can be updated does get updated.

And it's even happening to a degree to televised Doctor Who. Someone in this very thread — was it SOTO? — pointed out how they didn't know that there was a call between Martha and that Doctor-who-became-her-fiancé at the end of Last of the Time Lords, because the exchange doesn't happen in the iTunes version of the story, and the iTunes version is not marked as being edited.

So, again, while I'm happy to consider these well-praised stories as valid for writing in-universe articles here at Tardis, it may be that the better analogy here is not webcast but stage play. These narratives, or at least some aspects of them, could disappear in the blink of a download.