One of the most common reasons a game becomes unplayable is because it can only be played online and its servers have been shut down by publishers. In 2023 alone we saw nearly a dozen games like Battlefield, Call of Duty: Warzone, Knockout City, Spellbreak, Gundam Evolution, and more meet the same grim fate as the lights went off for good.
There are two tragedies when games go dark. First off, the work of all those programmers, artists, writers, animators, modelers, and everyone else who labored on a game, maybe for years, is gone forever. Killing a game is also anti-consumer because, y'know… people bought that game. They paid for a product, the same way they'd buy a book, a movie, or a song, and they should be able to use that product for as long as they like. Troublingly, there's no legal recourse when a game you paid for gets shut down.
