The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).
Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.
Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Associa...
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...
It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.
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I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.
This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.
It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.