carnival73: Films, books and music usually remain in publication or are fairly easy to access and don't require continued patching, tech support or participation of other consumers.
overread: Actually once out of production books, films and music can be just as hard to get hold of as out of production games. Once its phased out you're totally reliant on the second hand market and just as game CDs can get damaged so can books and music and mostly anything else.
The new shift toward electronic distribution is slowly presenting a possible change to this - since it costs the developers tiny amounts once the initial digital conversion is done (and most will have to do that anyway for printing) however even then licence agreements can run out of date - if a publisher only holds the licence for so long then once that contract is up unless its renewed it again falls out of distribution.
Games are somewhat at a problem with regard to tech support - however the same is again true of older, more hardware based things - cars, boats, old radios etc... If you go back far enough in what you want you've got to either learn the support skills yourself or find communities/specialists to tap into. At present the games industry is a little behind in the regard that there really are no specialist firms that deal with older game support outside of what they distribute - even GoG is limited in the support it can provide to older titles (and that isn't even getting anywhere near the fact that the vast majority of support problems for older games are linked to shifts in software licences supported by OS systems and also changes in the hardware and software of graphics and processor tech
I think the support that I'm referring to is that, before they ditched their game completely, they polished it up the best that they could (Marvel Trading Card Game was left windowed and they never implemented a full screen feature which I assume would've been easy enough to do.) and kept the game in publication. Konami should've still, at least, kept digital forms of the game on hand to sell to those whom were still interested in the game.
But because they never went back and polished it with a patch, because they stopped selling it after a few months and gave up on it., anyone that does have a copy will be hard pressed to set up a LAN game because no one else can acquire the game anymore.
This results in people seeing the production and going 'meh.'
The games that succeed and keep getting sequels released are games that the publishers stood by long enough to acquire the fan base to result in supply and demand of future releases and profitable franchise.
carnival73: This is another thing that I'm trying to point out - Sturgeon's law wouldn't be as relative because a lot of these crap games wouldn't be crap games if the developers would just keep supporting, expanding on or at least making available.
overread: I think you are vastly underestimating the support costs associated with a game. Further the games industry itself is not very stable for developers - yes we have out big few, but many (even successful ones) have merged or broken up over the years (GoG has problems with this when hunting some licences for distribution as they end up being lost in a paper-trail of changing hands or even broken up between multiple parties).
We'd all love for games to be long term supported; but the thing is unless its like Eve or WoW, where the long term support can be paid for with fees to play the game or something like Starcraft which generated masses of income from fan events and the like (heck in S. Korea its pretty much a sport) -- then its a dead duck for the developers. The game won't sell anywhere near the volume of units to continue supporting it and paying the people to work on the support.
But not even long term tech support is not necessary, just long term availability. If Konami wanted to throw MTCG in the toilet, couldn't they at least host a free downloadable version of the game so that new players could find it and join in LAN games with the original supporters whom invested in the game during its release?