Just because we have lost culture in the past doesn't mean that we should not try to stop the loss of future culture/knowledge. Also, as some stuff is subjective i'd be happy if MORE could be saved and not less(well with exceptions like the multitude of shovelware timewaster titles on phones, perhaps.).

Also simply "making more" will likely become less feasible over time with copyright/IP laws being ever extended and more and more ideas/concepts/IPs get locked behind legal framework/protections.

And yet we produce more art every year, not less.

And if you're willing to lose the phone apps, you admit that some stuff is not worth saving. We just disagree a bit on where to draw the line.

We make more, but as you inferred it's not all quality material. Also, who knows if a dev will hit the sweet spot that made a lost classic great and bring it back somehow?

As for phone apps...alot of them have similar gameplay/crap graphics/little plot and are just there to make money and waste people's time, but many cult classic games and hidden gems(played and known by maybe a small percentage of the population) are often much better overall(subjective/objective quality)

Ownership isn't meaningless in that you can still own most CD's, DVD's & Blu-Ray's, books, etc, in spite of Netflix, Spotify & Amazon's success. As you said, streaming is best for discovering what to watch and "throwaway" movies. For classics / favorites you want to rewatch in future, there's no substitute for having a collection under your own control. Modern gaming however, is the most anti-consumer out of all entertainment mediums though with ownership of physical discs restricted to pre-2010 games, and only a few select "digital" stores that sell DRM-Free offline installers of newer games. Really you have to decide what your priority is. If you want the latest AAA multi-player games, they pretty much are all DRM'd one way or another. If you prefer older / single player games and modern Indie's, it's still possible to own most of what you want. Personally I've reached the point where if PC gaming completely goes down the toilet over the next few years, eg, streaming replacing purchasing en masse, GOG disappears on the midst of the "store wars", pay2win, becoming even more "normalized", etc, I've got a large enough existing collection of games that I'll just ditch buying future PC games altogether, buy a couple of cheap spare backup CPU's / motherboards / GPU's, and stick to offline classic gaming (like many here, I have far more games than hours per day to play them). +1. Nope, you ended up "high rated" instead just for speaking the truth, when the only way of getting even legally owned copy-protected disc games to work on Microsoft "we blocked SecuRom & SafeDisc +15 years too late" Windows 10 is to source a "NoCD". Some of these games have been re-released on GOG, but many others have not. As for piracy, I'm not gonna promote that in general, but it is pretty sad when certain "abandonware" sites do a better job of long-term game preservation than legal ones, or that some people only resort to pirating games then legally buying the ones they want afterwards purely due to lack of downloadable playable demo's, all whilst publishers continue to head in the wrong direction in responding to that...

Likely, the more the bullshit-based corporations like EA push towards an always-connected future, the more there will be a powerful pushback that brought us GOG.com and DRM-free games on PC.

Just think about what is happening with social networks: once "a thing" for teens, it is now being deserted by the younger audience for something MUCH less gargantuan and corporation-driven social places.

The "future" of VR, online-only and other tech bullshit that makes shareholders cum has been greatly exaggerated.