As a person who works on a large online game, I appreciate what they are trying to do and I’m sympathetic to the pain of losing a game you love, in addition to the game preservation issues. However, games just aren’t the same as they were in the 90s. The service architecture is more complex, the ecosystem management is greater (ranked systems and matchmaking health for example), and games evolve in ways that are not backwards compatible.

I don’t want to say what they’re asking for is impossible, but I don’t think it’s realistic depending on competing goals. If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve, because some aspects just won’t exist without centralized services, lots of other players, and experts managing those systems. If you just want to host a single match on your own server, and maybe the other aspects like meta-game systems or matchmaking don’t matter to you as much, you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience. Matchmaking in particular is a complex problem, and the reason some games have become successful is moving away from the lobby or self-hosted server model toward centralized matchmaking, which needs constant tending and large player populations to be successful.

I’m open to the idea that these are solvable, but I don’t believe requiring it by law is a good idea. It just makes the cost of multiplayer games higher and riskier for publishers, and they’re already very risk averse because of the massive content costs involved.

Should games be cheaper because you’re just leasing them? Maybe, but there are armies of professionals who want to make a living doing just this that are required to make this stuff look like someone pushed a “make game” button. At least that’s how it works today. Should those devs get a larger slice of the pie than publishers or execs or whatever? I mean, hell yeah, but it doesn’t stop the reality that games are just more complex and massively more expensive to make than in the past, and that’s just where the market is. A proposal for how games can be preserved or given back to consumers at end of life really needs a more detailed proposal than “make it the law,” because I just don’t think it’s realistic.

All of the above is about explicitly multiplayer games. Single player games that have little to no multiplayer involvement at the core of the gameplay is an entirely different situation. There could still be complexities there, but you can get closer to the real game experience without centralized services.