Why Game Preservation Keeps Failing Players

The news that Myrient is shutting down somehow did not appear to be the kind of story that sticks. Everything surrounding it felt quiet. Too quiet. Maybe it’s because there’s no major publisher attached to it, no sudden controversy, no dramatic fallout that forces itself into our timeline. After all, the shutdown was delivered simply with a message, a few reasons, and then the slow realization that something genuinely important had disappeared. The more I sit with this, the more uncomfortable I feel.

Myrient was not just another ROM site. It was one of the closest things we had to a centralized archive of gaming history. Over 390 terabytes of games, spread across platforms, generations, and regions, all in one place. Whilst it wasn’t perfectly legal and not officially sanctioned, it was still undeniably useful – the kind of resource that was much bigger than the parts it was made of.

When Responsibility Falls on One Person

The explanation given by Myrient’s owner is sadly understandable, and you can almost read the exhaustion catching up in the statement. Traffic kept increasing, which in itself should be a good sign. More people were using the archive, there had been more interest, more relevance. Donations made to the site, however, did not reflect this growth. The result was a monthly deficit of more than $6,000, paid out of pocket, just to keep everything running. What was once a passion project became a huge financial liability and burden.

At the same time, parts of the ecosystem around Myrient started working against it. Third party download managers began bypassing the site itself, skipping donation messages and built-in protections entirely. Some of them went a step further and locked features behind their own paywalls, effectively turning Myrient into a backend for someone else’s profit. There is something especially frustrating about that. A resource built on community use, kept alive through personal cost, and then quietly exploited by the very people benefiting from it.

And then there is the part that feels almost unavoidable right now. Hardware costs are rising. RAM, SSDs, HDDs are all becoming more expensive as demand from AI infrastructure continues to grow. For most people, that is an inconvenience. For something like Myrient, it is a breaking point. Storage at that scale is not optional. It is the entire product.

So you end up with a project that is more popular than ever, more expensive than ever, and less sustainable than ever. A combination that rarely ends well.

This Is What Losing a Library Looks Like

It is easy to push back against the idea that anything is truly lost here. ROMs do not just vanish. Copies exist. Backups exist. Someone, somewhere, has what you are looking for. But that is not really the point.

Myrient was not just valuable because of the files it hosted. It was valuable because of how those files were organized, accessible, and maintained. It was a place you could go to with a reasonable expectation that what you were looking for might actually be there, and in a usable state.

Without it, preservation becomes fragmented. Instead of a library, you get a scattering of personal collections, incomplete mirrors, broken links, and outdated versions. Things are not necessarily gone, but they are no longer reliably accessible. There is a reason comparisons to something like the Library of Alexandria come up. Not because everything burns down overnight, but because access becomes uncertain. Knowledge still exists, but it is no longer gathered in a way that makes it usable. And in a medium like games, usability is everything.

The Legal Problem That Never Goes Away

Any conversation around ROM archives inevitably runs into the same wall: legality.

In many places, creating a backup of a game you own is not inherently illegal, at least not in isolation. The problem starts the moment that copy is shared. Distribution is where things become clearly unlawful, and that is exactly what sites like Myrient rely on. This is also why they are so fragile.

Companies, especially Nintendo, have made it very clear that they are not willing to tolerate large scale ROM distribution. Legal action is not hypothetical. It is consistent, targeted, and often successful. From their perspective, this is about protecting intellectual property, and that position is not going to change.

So archives like Myrient exist in a constant state of instability. Even if funding were not an issue, the legal risk would always be there. At any point, the entire structure can be challenged or removed. What makes this complicated is that legality and preservation are not aligned here. While distributing ROMs is illegal, losing access to large parts of gaming history is a very real concern, and something we have seen previously in the movie industry.

When Official Preservation Isn’t Enough

The obvious counterargument is that we should not need sites like Myrient in the first place. That preservation should happen through official channels, properly licensed, properly maintained, fully supported. And in some cases, it does.

GOG has built an entire platform around making older games playable on modern systems, often putting in the work to adapt them for current hardware and operating systems. The Video Game History Foundation goes even deeper, preserving source code, development assets, documentation, and cultural context around games.

These are exactly the kinds of initiatives the medium needs, but undeniably, they are also selective.

Not every game gets brought forward. Not every license can be resolved. Some companies disappear entirely, taking their catalogs with them. Others hold onto rights without doing anything with them, effectively locking games away. This is their right, and discussions surrounding that could fill an entirely different article.

Apart from that, there are also regional gaps. Games that were never released in certain parts of the world, or only existed in limited formats, become incredibly difficult to access later on. Physical copies become rare, expensive, or simply degrade over time. Hardware fails, and replacements are no longer manufactured.

If you were already an avid gamer when MS-DOS was still a thing, you might know how ephemeral video games can be, because once the support for that ceased, DOS games would simply no longer run on PCs with a newer operating system.

So even with official preservation efforts, there is still a significant amount of history that falls through the cracks. And that is exactly where archives like Myrient used to exist.

How Games Survive Without Official Support

What makes video game preservation so unusual is how much of it relies on individual effort. Getting a ROM from an old cartridge is not trivial. The game’s data sits on a memory chip inside that cartridge, and extracting it requires a device that can read that chip and convert it into a digital file. That alone takes technical knowledge and access to the right tools.

Once you have that file, you still need a way to run it. That is where emulators come in. They recreate the behavior of the original hardware, translating the game’s code into something a modern system can understand. It is not perfect. Some games have issues. Others do not run at all. But the core idea works well enough that entire generations of games have remained playable long after their original consoles disappeared.

All of this is almost always done without any formal support. No official backing, no guaranteed funding, and often no clear legal protection. It is preservation driven almost entirely by people who care enough to do it anyway.

We Don’t Really Know Who Is Responsible

Preservation is not exactly an exciting topic, and unless you take the time to look into it, it very much feels like something where it's easy to assume that somebody else is handling it. Publishers protect their IPs, but that does not mean they keep them accessible. Platform holders move forward, because that is how the industry survives. Players follow what is new, because that is where attention naturally goes, especially in a world where marketing budgets are usually on par with what’s needed to create a game in the first place.

And in the middle of that, the actual work of preserving games ends up scattered across non-profits, niche projects, and individuals. There is no single system holding it all together. Myrient worked because someone decided to take on that responsibility. Financially, technically, and to some extent legally. Once that stops, there is nothing automatic that replaces it.

The Bigger Shift We Are Not Talking About

What makes this feel more urgent now is how the way we access games is changing. More and more titles are digital only. Ownership is tied to accounts, storefronts, and licenses rather than physical copies. Some games rely on online infrastructure to function at all. Others are updated constantly, meaning there is no single “final” version to preserve. In that environment, access becomes even more fragile. If a storefront shuts down, a license expires, or a server goes offline, the game does not just become harder to find. It can become completely inaccessible, because we cannot sell digital games.

We are moving further away from a world where you can just hold onto a cartridge or a disc and expect it to work almost indefinitely. And we have not really figured out a solution to this just yet.

Myrient shutting down does not mean that video game history suddenly disappears. But it does make it harder to reach, less organized, and more dependent on scattered efforts. Preservation, at its core, is about access. Not just keeping something somewhere, but making sure it can actually be experienced. Right now, that access feels a lot more fragile than it probably should be. And if projects like Myrient are anything to go by, it only lasts as long as someone is willing and able to carry it.