> so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases
I don’t have time or interest to figure out how to go on the Usenet and research the reputation of scene groups.
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
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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.
1) The server doesn’t do much other than connect the players, and most of the logic is either client-side or trivial.
2) The server contains a fair bit of game content (such as drop and spawn rates, maybe even NPC dialogue) and the community has done extensive packet captures while the server was online.
3) The server binaries were leaked at some point, and everyone agrees to keep it a secret and pretend they’re doing a clean-room reimplementation from packet captures. They are, but against the leaked server, not the production server.
Having worked on a few of these projects, you’d be surprised at how many of the successful ones are actually #3.
This is problematic because we can’t rely on data breaches for game preservation.