alt Hacker NewsI've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
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I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.
Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.