Consider that basically every live-service game you have ever played will become unplayable sooner or later, and how many modern AAA games are live-service...
We can still play the NES version of Mario (1985), but we can't play Evolve (2015), Anthem (2019), Concord (2024), etc.
Yeah, I guess my perspective is along the lines of nothing of value was lost, at least not enough to mobilize people from more pressing causes, but clearly other people think differently.
The fun part about this is that Evolve is fundamentally a P2P game, so it got an offline revival pretty quickly. Anthem would have gotten one much quicker had they not wrapped the game in Denuvo, as it stands that one’s only possible under certain constraints (Linux with new enough AMD cpu/intel cpu, or windows with a hypervisor). Concord was similarly wrapped in an antitamper, but they shipped the majority of the stuff reqd for local play, so that got an offline revival as well.
Yes, absolutely! I personally want to be able to play games many years after they are released and after they have stopped receiving any support. Yet we see growing number of examples where this is not the case and you get locked out of a game permanently when its publisher decides it no longer wants to support it.