And I would agree.
DOSBox and GOG have been invaluable to me and the era and platform I came from, but that doesn’t cover everyone, not by a long shot.
I’ve gone a step further by keeping and maintaining most of my legacy computers going back to my first one in 1993. Admittedly, I rarely use those PCs, but it’s important for me to keep them around (and also my favorite boxed PC games) so that I have them in case my other options run out.
Newer games are a different beast. Much more complicated, many of them rely on internet connectivity. How will we play the newer Hitman games if IO Interactive disappears?
Multiplayer is yet another thing, but I can’t speak to that since I don’t play MP games. But by all accounts, many of these games have worlds that people will want to revisit.
More importantly, how many people will even care?
The prevailing consensus everywhere I go (even on these forums) seems to be that the ability to play games in the future is just not something that anyone but a select few sentimentalists care about. Heck, I am one of those sentimentalists, and I don’t play my old games nearly as much as I used to. I think there will always be solutions for the most popular games, but many of us got attached to less popular games, obscure games, or even games that others consider to be bad games.
My final thoughts: If you have games that are really, really important to you that you know you will want to play again, I think you’ve got to be your own preservationist. Keep the hardware and the physical software if you can. It’s the only way to be sure. And even then… Multiple copies may be better. :-)
The other problem is games designed for unique hardware like the DS and 3DS. I have no idea how those games can be properly preserved and played 50 years from now.
The challenge is not just playing for fun. It’s a matter of archiving. At my college we have a library of games going back several decades, many of which were donated by me and my wife actually. We also have an assortment of consoles and PCs from days of yore, and some robust emulation capabilities people are working on collating and maintaining. It’s a difficult but necessary task, because without this ability to experience the past it will be very difficult to write the story of gaming into the future.
People like to talk about how video games are art, and I’m sympathetic to that claim, but to make good on it we have to be able to do what we can do with other media, which is, experience it long after it was created. Art transcends time and place, or at least it can. For games to do so we need to be able to archive and reproduce the experiences.
CraigM
2970
Uh, same answer? Like those things do exist. Hardware emulation of the DS is dead simple, 3DS would be trickier only because the 3D screen effect.
I’ve never seen those two in real life. I thought you could use a stylus on one screen on some of those games? How do you emulate gameplay like that using a modern game controller for instance?
RickH
2972
Using the DS core on Retroarch, you can use a windows PC’s touch screen to control the emulator. I was pretty impressed.
rei
2973
Mouse works well for most lightgun and stylus input.
I’ve been playing some DS game on my Steam Deck. The touch screen works well for some games, but it’s definitely a little awkward at times.
spiffy
2975
I know it’s not remotely the same as playing a game, but quite often the itch to revisit an old game is scratched by watching a Youtube walkthrough, which also alleviates all the pains of learning an arcane interface, and is more realistic for me than replaying a 10-40 hour game.
I also feel like multiplayer games can’t ever be revisited properly anyway, without a playerbase to recreate the experience.
EA doing well. Better than 2021 equivalent. That’s got to be good news for the game industry overall I hope. Though I haven’t dug into the numbers, maybe it’s all because of shady practices with FIFA Ultimate team.

Well, they aren’t going to stop being mtx-heavy anytime soon, that’s for sure.
Mobile up, console and PC down on the same quarter last year. Also an unannounced “major IP” to be launched in the quarter ending in April 2023
I think perhaps the modern world of device-users, of which gamers are a broadening subset I suppose, is increasingly comfortable with experiences that are easily broken up into bite-size chunks, and which don’t require a significant investment of time and static engagement (like, with a console or PC sett up inn one place). In that context, the challenge for devs is not so much how to keep selling traditional games, but rather how to make games for the new reality that deliver the same level of quality and satisfaction of the traditional methods.
rei
2982
Well see how “swatting” remains a problem among gamers. People are broken.
Or maybe our society is broken? Decade after decade of rampant individualism, narcissistic self-indulgence, unregulated capitalism, and hyper-commodification of all aspects of identity and personality, coupled with profiteering off of shaming people for everything from body image to relationship status, it’s a wonder any of us can even breathe.
Turtle Beach is in trouble.
Sounds like some kind of shell game.
rei
2986
Logitech will subsume them and they’ll die off quietly. Just like Ultimate Ears, Jaybird and countless other brands that stopped innovating.