Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet the obscure forgotten stuff is still playable if you kept a copy of the disc. Those games didn't need a community to preserve them, because they were not designed to be ephemeral like live service games.
It's not like they were designed like that on purpose. It was a limitation of the technology of the time. If they could've made as many live service games back then, they would have. This comparison is also unfair for a couple more reasons: - It ignores the fact that when a game was released on CD back then... that's it. No updates. No patches. Nothing. You break it, that's it. Game ending bug that corrupts your save…
Not every game released today is a live service game and I'm pretty sure people would have had the same objections back in those days.
> Is romanticizing an era of gaming that was not all that great the way forward? I don't think so.
People advocating for video game preservation aren't advocating we all go back to CD-ROM. Video game preservation can be done digitally perfectly fine.
What people are advocating for is that games are designed to remain at least functional once the company doesn't deem it financially viable to provide services for that game anymore.