87 percent of classic video games released before 2010 in the United States have failed to be preserved in any real capacity, according to the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF).
In a new study on classic video games and their "commercial availability," the VGHF found that these older titles are "critically endangered," revealing that video games released between 1975 and 1979 have an availability rate of .89 percent , while the early '90s (1990-1994) has 19.33 percent. Coming in behind the '90s are 2005-2009 (17.89 percent). Less than 3 percent of games released before 1985 remain in print today.
Read more over at Game Developer.
the sad reality there isn't just that a lot of those games are commercially unavailable, but lost due to a combination of things like rights issues, the only available distros having questionable legal provenance, and sometimes those games just outright having ceased to exist
but what really scares me is the drop between the 90s (even 2000-2004!) and 2005-2009. I wouldn't be surprised if we see that drop get even worse as that's right on the cusp of the live service era really kicking off, right when we start to see games getting delisted from online storefronts with the only options to play them being either having them already downloaded or owning physical copies
it's not just that games are losing their history, it's that games are losing their contemporaries