This is one of the many reasons I no longer buy modern games. Always-online DRM (even in single-player games), day 1 patches, discs that only have a fraction of the content on them, games that require DLC purchases to actually play properly, etc. Even when playing console games, it's infinitely easier and more fun for me to just turn on my PSX or Saturn instead of firing up my PS4. If I do spot something that I think I might want to buy, I just wait for it to go on sale on Steam.<br><br>Speaking of which, my brother went to Best Buy to buy Fallout 3 when it came out (back in 2008), because he wanted a physical copy of the game instead of just downloading it off Steam. He was so pissed when he got home to find nothing in the box but a Steam installer inside with a license key. That was the beginning of the end for me.<br><br>Luckily there are projects like ExoDOS for older PC games, but there's a ton of newer games that deserve the same level of preservation which we unfortunately won't see happen for a very long time due to the technical complexity of making those games run on modern hardware. I realized years ago that the industry itself does not care about preserving old games and that piracy would ultimately end up functioning as a digital software archive, which still kinda sucks because sometimes the games are altered in order to make the release, or the release is buggy because of the intent to get it out it as fast as possible. Even GOG is often a less-than optimal solution as some games use flawed or incomplete sources, or different region versions that alter the content from the original region's release. There's also occasionally issues where GOG does the bare minimum to make a game work, only the game doesn't actually work completely, ie you can't actually finish the game because of a critical bug that GOG never bothered to fix.<br><br>And then there's the issue with paying for old games, especially ones that you already own, through modern services like GOG or Steam. Sure, these CAN BE great, convenient options, but licensing causes so many problems and who really deserves to get paid for a game when the original companies that developed and published it are long defunct and the programmers who actually did the work get nothing from it?<br><br>I could probably go on and on, but suffice it to say, game preservation is currently full of problems and I only see it getting worse with time.,(reply>), One thing I forgot about is Motor City Online. This was a pretty cool game (released in 2001) in which you could buy and build cars and then race them online against other people. I started paying the monthly subscription to play the game in 2003, and I played it for about 5 months or so before EA decided out of nowhere that they were shutting the servers down, despite the fact that there were still a lot of users paying to play the game. From that point forward, I've never spent a dime on an online-only game and I never will.