Usually the latter, not just game devs themselves, but also infrastructure devs.

No. You don't receive any rights to use the IP when you buy the game, so you don't get them when the publisher decided to discontinue it.

Regarding the argument about modification of the assets - I don't see the issue. Nobody will hold the publisher responsible for what other people do. You can already do that with e.g. Counter Strike - host your own server, take an official Valve map and replace some textures with something inappropriate. No one will blame Valve for this, since they do not host those servers.

So I have thought it through. Also, AI has nothing to do with this, not sure why you bring it up...

Here is one - I never got to play The Crew which got closed in 2024. But I would certainly like to do that now and some time later (10, 20 or even 50 years later). The same goes for Diablo 3 and 4, which did not shut down yet but they might. I just want to be sure that I will be able to play a game in the future. I do replay and reevaluate games, so for me it's important to keep them available all the time. Especially if I paid money for them.

No? I don't want any developer to suddenly "want" to write code that bricks my OS for instance. What if they decide to do this after the game was released and I bought it?

I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.

This is true, but the issue is not with the content, it's with the ability (or rather inability) to access any of the content past some point. Even if only the latest content is left accessible after EOL, it will still be better than having nothing at all. The older content can be added back, no matter how finicky it can sometimes be.

Regarding the dependencies, no one is forcing the developers to release closed ones, you can replace them with stubs. But it will be beneficial from a developer to think about it beforehand - how they will implement online systems with additional requirement of EOL etc. It's not an implementation problem, but rather an architectural one.

He doesn't. He just reports events as a journalist. He doesn't fight against open source.

You can check by copying the url of the blank game and pasting it into SteamDB's search field.

It baffles me that this is still an issue, publishers are not concerned with implementing some sort of "kill switch" for expired content to keep getting money for the games. GTA also suffered from this.

Nothing. People already do that. GOG does not fight against this, to my knowledge they believe that people will willingly pay for good games. It worked with Witcher 3 10 years ago as an example.

That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.