> people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums have the kind of longevity that just isn’t afforded to modern digital apps.

This line stood out to me the most. Along with payment issues, one of the larger issues is bitrot. What if Windows phones gets a 99% market share next year? That's 99% of users who will never be able to play Hogarth's game because it was never ported. Even if we put aside proactive adaption, there's also an issue of the code stagnating in relation to its environment. Entire architectures might change such as Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel, or requirements might get tighter like sandboxing in the app store or the recent SPI mechanism that protects system files. Sure you might have emulators but that mostly relegates the software for later generations with more powerful hardware; to be played with nostalgia rather than in the moment.

I don't know what the solution is, but we definitely need to do something to preserve these kinds of things for the future, like how the Internet Archive is breathing new life into MS-DOS games using in-browser emulation. [0] For one thing we need to preserve the binaries of games like these in case they do go down, and related to that, the specific software versions they ran on. (I'm contradicting myself here because these are the only non-radical approaches I see right now as opposed to something like a reserve for source code to be released when it enters the public domain).

[0]: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games