Sadly a huge issue for a lot of older games is their limited license agreements on the music and sounds in their games. Studios would get 5-10 year agreements for the sounds and music in their games from the copy right holders. The copy right holders then would exchange hands over the years or far more complex issues of who in what country owned which copy right. Making it not an option to try and renew things at any reasonable price.

Quite a few of the Might & Magic games that I got off GoG all have to come with an emulator just to get them to work. All it takes is just one OS update breaking it and those GoG versions of the game stop working. If I recall one of them was broken for years till someone made a patch to get what ever Might & Magic game it was working again.

The solution for preserving games will more then likely be AI. Someday all the old consoles, CD’s, and any physical things will no longer work. OS, graphic cards, and so many other things will change over the years to the point it becomes harder and harder to keep emulations working for older games on current hardware.

With times comes the end of copyrights as they slowly expire many decades later. Long past most people who where ever around to play the originals.

Thankfully I have the couple of games I really cared about from my childhood in digital formats. I’m sure one day I’ll go to play them after a decade of time has passed since my last play of them. Just to discover they no longer run with no known workaround posts by anyone online. Their physical forms have long since stopped working or I no longer have.

The real loss is going to be all the "always online" gaming world we live in now. A few years back the holders of the Might and Magic series came out with one final game. At one point to cut costs they pulled servers to lots of old games. One of them checked if you owned any of the DLCs. Breaking the game. Thankfully there was enough outcry after many months they put out a patch fixing the issue.