Suggestion for how to preserve video games

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in response to "Let’s make games open source, so future generations can enjoy them"

Lets be realistic, companies won’t want to make it open source because they think it will lead to a loss of revenue (there is a mindset of “never work for free”). openttd basically led to loss of revenue because now that there is a open source version (even the assets got re-implemented) people that are playing that are not playing proprietary games (including the proprietary original version).

You might argue there is no significant loss, but i don’t think you can prove that especially to the people who own the companies which include pension fund managers who only care about the profits because if they will underperform people will go to some other pension fund or invest in other stuff like real estate.

A source available license is a more realistic option , You get the source code and permission to improve it but still have to pay something to run the game.

I would argue that even having a project as source available is better then closed source and can still be pretty good, look at for example the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project.

If you look at openage (age of empires 2 reimplementation) the game is not playable 25 years after release and that game is considered a classic, we could lose a lot of very good games or software.

If anybody want to ask a game creator to make a game open source and he refuses, suggesting a source available license might still be a good idea.