I'd rather play a game that, if I should want to play it 20 years from now and there are no update servers - which I do still do with my old consoles - I can pop it in and not worry about bugs I have to figure out how to get patched. Games will inevitably have bugs, but developers have become too reliant on the update mechanisms and games have shipped completely busted.
That's an interesting point. I hadn't considered the impact of ondemand updates to future abandonware - looks like another case where pirated illegal versions might have better preservation than official ones.
Command&Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack also received community patches (I contributed to them a lot) to its binary. When EA later released The First Decade bundle with all the old games in it, they removed the old copy-protection. Most games in the bundle were simply recompiled to remove it, but for the expansion pack they hex-edited the copy-protection to keep it community patch compatible.
