He actually admits this and walks back on his own point here. Kotaku articles have an annoying tendency to do this lately. 

Even way back in the day of cartridges games would release buggy and broken, there was just no way to go back and fix them sort of a rerelease. Which is why there are “Gold” versions of classic games that fixed bugs and added new content.

The last gaming generation to see fully preserved games printed on disc or cartridge was Wii/PS2/DS. Gaming systems that came out after this era started the concept putting “some” of the data on the disc and got the consumer to pay/download the rest as DLC/updates. This is already causing havoc in the emulation…

I work as an archivist by trade, and it’s not as trivial as you may believe it is and - personally - I would argue the entire situation is actually worse that people may realize.

I rarely buy games that are $40-60 a title, and when I do it’s usually either on sale, or a Nintendo game that’s not on Gamepass anyways.

I wholeheartedly agree with the subject of not owning the things you are interacting with and how it is, extremely bad.

Also worth mentioning that many multiplayer games are gone forever because they are no longer playable after their servers go down. I really wish that the last act of any online game was to give us the option to host our own servers so that we can continue to play the game after official support is removed. 

I’ll have you know I bought 4 CD’s just last week. The Coup’s Party Music and Pick a Bigger Weapon, and two CD’s by The Thermals, on a whim to rediscover some old(ish) punk I missed out on during my decade long fugue state.

Some dude stashing thousands of games in his basement and making youtube videos about them is not doing anything to preserve the history of games. If you want to preserve games then you should donate to the video game history foundation and donate to emulator developers because private collections are not a viable way…

Ironically the games that are least preserved are owned by Microsoft as they will never leave the program. 

Support you emulation and crack scenes that’s all I’ll say

I still buy CDs. (And DVDs and Blu-rays and physical game discs.) I am that guy. And it is  partly for this reason.

My obligatory comment that you can’t play the Xbox versions of Halo and Halo 2 on anything newer than a 360.

You rang?

Give me a damn way of finishing Lost Odyssey then you bastard.

Another article about renting games you have the option to buy huh? Slow news day?

Heya. I mean that as opposed to earlier on when it was more difficult and uncommon to preserve the codebases of games, it’s standard operating practice to maintain source code. Archiving is now a trivial matter. By author I mean developer or dev team. 

Support GOG! Download the installers for the games you buy!

When Microsoft shook the gaming world with their original plans for the Xbox One, the outrage was real and necessary. But you’ll have to forgive me if I say that it seemed like a lot of that outrage only paid lip service to the underlying issue there. The industry was moving in a direction that would diminish the…

Games are no longer an unchanging thing that can be immortalized on a disc anyway. They are released essentially unfinished, so at best you’re ‘preserving’ the worst, most incomplete and buggy version imaginable, and that’s before you factor in the fact that physical media is fragile.