A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.
These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.
Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.
The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.
Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.
Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.
It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.
I am old enough that already have lost some childhood (e.g. early iPod touch) games to time
Like all the donout games Or papi games Doodle jump …
Some still exist, but got updates that they not at all behaving like remembered or having tons of ads making it impossible to game
As an example:
I am so happy that they released Hill Climb Racing again without ads, sadly it is on Apple Arcade, but luckily my parents have a Apple One subscription that I am allowed to use through family sharing (for the time being)
But if this subscription is ended, I have no way on playing Hill Climb Racing in a version without tons of micropayments and ads.
The good thing is, on Android you can get an APK without root or anything like that, same for installing it, and you can use an emulator (or something like waydroid) to run it on a computer. For cases where the game doesn’t use any more specialized servers, and just uses the app store for authentication, DRM, etc. the situation is no different from PC games with DRM - it’s bypassable, and if done right, will work for all games, not just one.
That said though, it’s very true for multiplayer/always online games, and those are very common on mobile. While it’s possible to reverse engineer and rewrite the servers, for most of them nobody is going to bother. And in the world of aggressively monetized games, developers have an incentive to keep it that way - they can’t make money from players who are still enjoying a game they’ve already squeezed every penny out of.
Apps are challenging to preserve, but it’s the MMORPGs and online games that are almost impossible since there is no game without active servers and people playing the game. Hardware can be emulated and code preserved, so the apps you’re talking about could be preserved IF Apple, Google et al wanted to - which of course probably won’t happen, but still.