A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
I think it could be viable for a company to release a game with a “5 year FOSS promise” or something similar, but you have to realize that the gaming community would never adequately financially support most development endeavors if the choice was as easy as downloading it from place A vs place B.
Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.
People still buy the games.