We remember the best 10% of old games but compare them to 100% of new games, including the 90% that are crap.

While I think there’s truth to this, with regards to single player games, I think multiplayer games have had a notable shift toward “service” that gives players less agency to keep games alive.

There are dozens of old PC games with moderately active gaming communities, like CS1.6 and the like. Newer games tend to get “shutdown” and the services are no longer available. Users have to have enough passion for these games to be willing to completely reverse engineer the server backend,

I think the point of this article is to share that games without proper modding support or indefinite “always online” connection checks tend to die, whereas old games that don’t have these features have the opportunity to live “forever” (or as long as there are still people willing to play.)