Games disappearing, shutting down, or going away forever
Another year, another batch of video games wiped from the face of the Earth for various reasons. Sometimes it is because the servers running the game are shut down or other times it’s because the entire service powering the games begins to shut down. And other times games just vanish into the ether
Sure, for some gameslike Deus Ex GO, there are other ways to play them even after they are removed from stores. But for stuff like Stadia exclusive games or MMOs that are shut down, there’s not much the average user can do to play these games again. Game preservation is better in 2022 than in the past, but that’s mainly for single-player games released on PC or console. For mobile games, MMOs, or other titles that require online servers, preservation is damn near impossible without a lot of work or direct help from the devs and publishers. And as history has shown, you can’t rely on big corps to help save game history.
So for now, a lot of games will just become near-impossible to play in 2023. What a shame.
