Well, thanks to the hard work of the software pirates of yore, this shouldn't be much of an issue. While many of them just wanted a free game, or the reputation of cracking the most games, or just worked with the joy of an engineer solving an interesting problem, at least some of them were probably working actively to free(libre) games... imagine if paintings expired with their painter, or (as many did) were lost when their painter's patron was deposed and his holdings sacked... imagine if movies stopped playing... frames fell out of order, audio garbled... when the original studios went under? They do to an extent... paintings and analog film decay or get lost... but unlike games there's no prohibition against restoring those original works, but rather a celebration of it... while the software pirates have to work in the shadows to keep old games playing, since their work is still technically illegal in the US... shame about that. (and not that stealing games just to save a buck is a good thing, game devs are under appreciated, and typically underpaid, the games usually being presented as the work of one master game designer... but cracking games to overcome DRM... to protect the consumer and cultural contribution against the short sightedness and/or budgetary concerns of studios... is most certainly a good thing.)
