I feel like a tourist on a safari trip with this whole saga. A colleague of mine told me about this situation and now I can't look away.
When all is said and done, I definitely think it would be a good idea to have game libraries both physical and digital where people can play old games as they stop being profitable to developers.
I have vague memory of there already being such consumer made game libraries for old Gameboy titles back in the 2000s but those sites were taken down. It would be great to have some sort of system in place because this licensing bullshit is exactly why I ended up completely leaving streaming as a whole (for movies and shows) and went back to physical media in january/February of this year. I borrow dvds at the library now. It is fucking fantastic. I had forgotten how much I missed going looking for movies I'd like to see in places like Moby Disc and Blockbuster. It's so comfy and when you find a movie you've never heard of before and you bring it home and it's really good, it just feels so special.
I think games should have that too. I stopped playing games in 2015 because I just saw no end to having to fork out money all the time to keep up with the tech and getting new titles and gradually seeing how it was more and more an online thing instead of a physical thing so I just stopped. Didn't like the direction games were taking. Seems like it is reaching a breaking point finally.
Libraries are so important for culture.