I wonder how much of this is actually avoidable. The pace at which software develops is just too high to maintain backwards compatibility layers all the time.<br><br>Regardless of my opinion about Microsoft Windows, they tried to maintain backwards compatibility with binaries written for older versions for a long time and it causes severe interoperability problems with other OSs.<br><br>I don't see how anything short of a source code release at the point of abandonment so that the community can maintain it would really fix the problem. There are games that did that, but they are very rare. It probably doesn't work if you have newer games based on the same codebase.