This will be a bit long, but it is an issue that concerns me greatly, so this seems like a good place to write about it.<br><br>I'm over 50, and I've been playing video games since the late 1970s.  Abandonware is not a new issue.  A lot of companies went bust in the aftermath of the video game crash of 1983, so the only way to acquire their games was to sail the seven seas, which in those days meant having a network of gamer friends and copying floppy disks.  Having a modded disk drive that would copy copy-protected disks helped too.  Nowadays, abandonware sites serve the same purpose.  This can work for offline games, and they are a good place to find no-CD cracks, but sometimes the games on these sites are bugged or incomplete, and I wouldn't be surprised if malware has been distributed through these sites.  Also, older games might not work well with current hardware and operating systems.  There are some workarounds.  Linux with Wine sometimes works better than modern Windows for older games, though results are mixed for the Windows 3.1/95 era.  Virtual machines can work.  DOSBox works very well for most MS-DOS games.  Keeping old hardware up and running also works, as I have done with my Atari 800 and its modded disk drives.<br><br>I remember when SimCity 2013 came out.  It made no sense to me that a single player game would have an always-online requirement.  Naturally, I refused to buy it even though I was a fan of SimCity.  There was a lot of backlash at the time, but sadly, most gamers ultimately acquiesced, and it is now an accepted practice.  I do not accept it and will not buy a game that has always-online DRM no matter how badly I might want it.  I also worry about games requiring launchers, which is the reason that I buy the vast majority of my games from GOG and download the offline installers.  I have broken down and bought a few games on Steam, but I worry about what will happen if Steam vanishes one day.  I have had occasional trouble accessing games when the servers go down for maintenance, a situation that will likely lead me to search for Steam cracks for games that I have purchased.  Fortunately, this only seems to affect games at startup, and they don't have to remain online, so cracking Steam shouldn't be a huge technical problem if it becomes necessary one day.<br><br>The situation of always-online games reminds me of another time period from which a lot of cultural products have been lost - the silent film era.  Until the advent of VCRs, most people didn't collect video media in their homes, and films were held by studios, theaters, and a small number of specialist private collectors.  With very few prints existing for many films, and all of these prints languishing in storage, there are many films for which all copies have rotted away or been destroyed in some other way.  The situation is similar with always-online video games.  Since some of the code necessary to keep them running is held by the developers and is not released to the public, there is a high risk that it will be lost for good so that even if the rights holder wants to reissue the game in 50 years, it will be impossible.  Even with some well known single player games, the code has been lost.  The reason why there isn't a remastered and expanded version of Icewind Dale 2, while Icewind Dale and Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 have been remastered, is that the code was lost.  Fortunately, Icewind Dale 2 in its original form is still available and is easily obtained on GOG, but losing the code could make it more difficult in the future to update this game for ever evolving hardware and operating systems.<br><br>I don't play multiplayer games, so I haven't followed that scene closely, but news of games shutting down and becoming unplayable is sadly a frequent occurrence.  Recently, it was announced that Babylon's Fall, which failed at launch, would be shut down after just less than a year.  Even though this was evidently not a good game, it is still sad to see it and others like it disappear into the ether.  Nowadays, people treasure many of the surviving films that are more than 100 years old.  100 years of now, people will certainly feel the same way about games, and all that will remain of many, or perhaps most, multiplayer online games, will be gameplay videos unless developers are keeping multiple copies of the complete code (and likely running afoul of company policies in the process).  As an aside, hopefully someone out there is archiving everything that gets uploaded to YouTube so that we don't also lose the gameplay footage.<br><br>It is certainly a depressing situation, but I have little hope that people have learned the lesson of the silent film era.  They will let these games slip away, and future generations will curse their shortsightedness.,(reply>), @Heather Harrison I would agree that multiplayer is very hard to preserve because not all of the software is available to the player, but at least online single player is savable, because it is just one part of the program that checks for online presence of steam or whatever of the sort, which is the part that the pirates remove, because it is also there to check whether there was an unwanted change (like say illegal copying or modifying). So, for the pirated program to work, they remove it, and the game works fine. Multiplayer on the other hand is usually so intertwined with the necessity of the internet connection that it is simply unplayable otherwise and also needs additional software that is not needed for a player, so if it's not released to the public, it can't be saved in it's original form. It's a good thing modders are so good at what they do that they may come up with solutions, but chances are that not every online game is even possible to be saved, precisely because of it's programing. But since single player isn't dependent on online (I believe even mobile games with adds just have a piece of software that's tacked on for those adds), no matter how some try to make it a mess to find and remove, it is usable without it, so if a 'always online' game is on a piracy site, it already overcame the biggest hurdle.,(reply>), @Swan Rider The situation in the 1980s certainly was chaotic - I was there.  It was exciting, but it was a mess.  However, very few of the games on the major platforms have been lost, in large part thanks to piracy, which was rampant back in the day.  I wonder about smaller platforms, such as the Timex Sinclair and the TI 99/4A, that never had much of a following.  Hopefully these systems had their fans who pirated the software and preserved it for posterity.<br><br>Single player games that aren't always online are not likely to be lost.  Back in the 1980s, any game that was released (and any other software, for that matter) circulated among groups of middle and high school students who sailed the seven seas, and large collections were accumulated.  I was a hub for this activity at my school, as I had a friend at a different school who collected Atari software, and we were the conduit between these two schools.  To this day, both of us have kept our Atari systems running and have kept our large collections of software, which consist of well over 1000 games and many other types of software (we happily collected business and education software as well).  As the internet became widely accessible, people released their collections of old software, and emulators were developed, so this long forgotten and abandoned software could be made available to a new generation.<br><br>Online multiplayer games (and possibly single player games with always-online DRM) are at much higher risk of being lost because the server software is not generally available.  We may end up with a bizarre situation in which the pioneering games of the 1970s and 1980s are very well preserved (as they are now), but an important subset of 2010s and 2020s games are lost.  I just hope that employees at these companies have surreptitiously kept copies of the code so that these games can be resurrected in the future.  As in the silent film era, we are depending on a very small number of people to make it possible to bring these online games back in the distant future.,(reply>), Thank you for writing something so detailed and full of thoughts/experience. It makes my heart feel good to see all the long trains of thought as people problem-solve and relive years gone by. Yes this is unfortunately just like the silent film era.,(reply>), As someone younger and considerably more hopeful, looking at the history I learned. <br>It feels to me that the silent film era had a different mindset to what we had latter and especially now. People are getting more and more aware of the situation and importance of films and games (even things such as advertisements in certain subsets of the archivers), while I feel that the people thought films were just a cool knew thing. Especially when they appeared, they were not for the general population. They really were just a cool new thing. The very first animated movie is not saved entirely because it felt like a novel showing off of human ingenuity and that was it.<br>But it became bigger and grew, THEN people fell in love with the medium, and THEN some started to realize what was going to happen. Some really cool stories of found lost media start then and later on, only growing in frequency. ESSPECIALY with Dr. Who. That is how most people find out, because it is so famous.<br>Now games came into the picture later enough to catch some of the people trying to preserve things. The oldest classic games, are usually playable now. Arcade games are saved, even as whole arcades waiting to be saved and made playable digitally on a computer. Early PC, Atari, Amiga etc. from my understanding was chaotic. There were a lot of games and not a lot of big names, so unfortunately, a lot of those are doomed to be lost. But there were still people saving those. There still are. So many games (and movies too, they still manage to get obscure) are found being owned by people who simply...kept them.<br>VHS era has some of the most awesome cases of found footage because VHSs made it easy to record TV broadcasts. So a lot of things that were shown only ONCE, were saved. As PC dominated, so grew more specific companies and genres and ways for people to make games for people who want to play them and save them. Now, yes, the online space has grown in a bad way to make media less accessible, but it also helped grow communities of people wanting to save that media, by any means possible. I can't speak for online games as I am far from an expert, but they've done it with Club Penguin (a lot of times, oh poor poor Disney, how will they survive knowing a game they don't want to keep running is playable somewhere out there) so I don't see a reason why it would be impossible with all the rest.<br>I hope at least this comment section is some reassurance that there are quite a lot of people who won't let these go without a fight. It will take a lot of effort, as it is going against companies that are just itching for a good court case to win and often borderline does go against a law that was not made to handle such a different case scenario with such a different medium. Be it saving, emulating, copying, cracking, going against a law far too old, getting on the nerves of big companies all over...this is not silent film era.