PC Gaming

It's exactly GOG's thing that games sold there can't have any DRM, so this scenario is out. (Also, no disk with GOG games ;))

Probably why you won't find things like Red Dead Redeption II (PC) in GOG, since Rockstar wants to force you to register in their systems to get your sweet, sweet private info. (Curiously, the pirated version has no such anti-consumer crap)

In my experience as a gamer for almost 4 decades, the most likely scenario with a really old game is that it simply won't install or run in the OS version or even hardware that you have now, though give it enough time and somebody out there will have created an emulator or adaptor layer for it (like DOSBox).

But yeah, any game from the Phone-home DRM generation which isn't bought from a seller which has No DRM policy (which only GOG has, as far as I know - even itch.io doesn't have a No DRM policy) will almost certainly have an artificially created end-of-life that has nothing to do with the OS or hardware you have being too new for the game.

I don't think GOG allow games like that on their platform.

I've been a gamer for almost 4 decades, so I have quite a lot of experience wanting to run games that I remember were a lot of fun and it turns out they are so old they won't run anymore.

Typically it's one of 3 things:

• The hardware I have now won't support it (say, I don't have a floopy drive anymore, or they're from an entirelly different architecture such as the pre-PC game consoles). There's also quirky ones such as games made at a time when CPUs were so slow that the game just runs as fast as it can (which was fine for older CPUs, but not for CPUs which are thousands of times faster) rather than use the system clock to set its tempo.
• The OS I have won't support it. Say, it's a DOS or Windows 3.1 game
• The game has DRM which relies on shit which doesn't apply anymore (for example, OS quirks that aren't present in newer OS versions).

There are often ways around the first two - for the hardware sometimes you can get modern versions of older hardware (for example you can actually get an external USB Floppy Disk Drive) and if it's old enough there will be emulators, whilst for the OS it's either emulators or adaptor layers.

Only way around the third is either a game crack or the game having no DRM to begin with.

Now, outside the transition of hardware architectures (say, from Amiga to PC) this used to apply maybe after a game was out 10 - 20 years. In the Phone-home DRM generation this seems to apply much faster - the game maker just turns off their servers 5 - 10 years after the game is out and now you can't legally play that game anymore.

All this to say that GOG and Pirates are the only ones fighting the good fight on making sure we won't suffer this shit some years from now, which is even more important now that we're in the Phone-home DRM age.

Agreed. Someone complained Firefox moved to updates every few days or something.

They had no clue Firefox updates like all the time.