With a lot of companies no longer doing physical games, then would that give rise to more Piracy?
Probably about the same. People always find a way.
How will video game preservation work then?
Games are just data, whether physical or digital. What gets lost is the servers for online functionality an such.
“What gets lost is the servers for online functionality an such.” nope, not at all, modern game preservation is a legal challenge because shareholder would rather have them destroyed forever when it’s not profitable than breaking DRM protection, opening the source code, or simply allowing the data to be saved by third parties.
https://www.techspot.com/news/112985-video-game-history-foundation-founder-piracy-remains-only.html
The only legal way for game preservation is buying exclusively DRM-free games, if they sell DRM-free games the selling of physical copies doesn’t matter (you can make your copies at home, save at another HDD, a flash drive, upload to a cloud service you subscribe, or burn to a CD/DVD/Bluray, you own that copy and do whatever you want with it)
I always see gamers praising Steam as if it ever sold physical games and it wasn’t also only renting games, maybe they are dying to give Gabe a sloppy, but can they trust the investors that are going to run the company after him? Steam is part of the same problem.
As for non-DRM-free games, since they are not really selling the game and just giving a license they can revoke whenever they feel like, the moral thing to do is pirate it.
No
It’s probably been about a decade since I bought a game on physical media, and that would have been a Nintendo product. I don’t think I’ve purchased a PC game on physical media for a couple decades, and yet I keep hearing about pirated copies of them. I don’t think physical copies disappearing will have a significant impact on the level of piracy in either direction.
