From London: As Australians woke on Friday morning, word was spreading through gaming forums and retro computing communities that one of the internet's most respected game archives had decided to call it quits. Myrient, a free, ad-free repository holding more than 390 terabytes of classic video game files, announced it will go permanently offline on 31 March 2026. The cause, according to its founder, is a familiar story dressed in unfamiliar numbers: the AI infrastructure boom is now reaching into the pockets of volunteer archivists.
Founded in October 2022 by a user known only as Alexey, Myrient had operated without advertisements, paywalls, or login requirements since it first appeared, relying entirely on a small pool of voluntary donations to stay online. For three years it was regarded in retro gaming circles as something close to ideal: fast, comprehensive, and free of the pop-up-laden middlemen that plague most comparable sites. Unlike many similar services, it verified every file against known-good checksums to ensure integrity. That reputation, it turns out, came at a personal financial cost its founder could no longer absorb.
Despite traffic growing steadily over the past year, donations remained flat, leaving Alexey personally covering more than $6,000 per month in operating costs. "I have been paying more than $6,000 out of pocket every month in order to cover the difference, which is not sustainable," he wrote in the shutdown notice.
The donation shortfall alone might have been manageable, but two additional pressures compounded the problem at the worst possible time. The AI infrastructure boom has driven up prices for RAM, SSDs, and hard drives since at least September 2025, with Myrient's hosting costs rising in parallel and necessary upgrades to its storage and caching infrastructure becoming unaffordable. The numbers tell the story bluntly: hard drive prices have risen an average of 46 percent since September 2025, and Western Digital has reportedly sold out its entire hard drive production run for 2026. For a service running a large number of servers, those figures are not abstractions.
The third pressure came from within the community itself. In recent months, several specialised tools appeared that bypassed Myrient's donation prompts and built-in download protections, with some locking features behind their own subscription fees, directly violating Myrient's longstanding prohibition on commercial use of its content. The founder described the practice as intolerable, and it is difficult to argue with him. A volunteer-run archive being parasitised by for-profit download managers is precisely the kind of free-rider problem that erodes any commons-based resource.
The news spread rapidly after fellow archival site Vimm's Lair shared Alexey's announcement on X, where it attracted millions of views, with the post's caption, "This is what AI and greed does", capturing the mood of many in the community. The sentiment is understandable, if somewhat incomplete. Alexey himself noted that rising hardware prices were only a partial cause, with insufficient donations remaining the primary issue. Blaming the AI industry is satisfying shorthand, but it sidesteps the question of whether the volunteer donation model was ever viable at this scale.
There is a genuine and uncomfortable legal dimension to all of this that tends to be glossed over in the outpouring of community grief. While the legality of what sites like Myrient do is questionable, since they host content without permission from the original rights holders, many in the community still view their closure as a loss for overall game preservation. That tension is real. At the core of the issue is a fundamental mismatch between how games age and how the law treats them: video games have short commercial lives but extremely long legal ones. Copyright terms extend for decades after a game ceases to be commercially available, leaving entire libraries in a kind of legal limbo where they are protected but not sold.
The Video Game History Foundation has found that 87 percent of classic games are out of print or otherwise inaccessible, a figure that makes plain why communities turn to unofficial archives when rights holders do not fill the gap. Sites like Myrient play a role in preservation particularly because many original IP holders no longer exist, and many titles are also unlikely to be re-released due to the expiration of decades-old licensing deals. These are not piracy-motivated arguments; they are cultural heritage arguments, and they deserve to be taken seriously on their merits.
The counter-position is equally serious. Rights holders, including large publishers and small independent developers whose back catalogues still generate licensing income, have a legitimate interest in controlling how their work is distributed. Courts draw a hard line between the software that imitates old hardware and the copyrighted game data required to run it, with judicial rulings consistently stating that distributing or downloading copyrighted ROMs constitutes infringement. The law is not ambiguous on this point, even if its application feels harsh when directed at an archive with evident cultural intent.
Myrient will remain online until 31 March 2026, but no further content can be uploaded as of 26 February, with Alexey asking that users download any content they find important in the time remaining. Whether mirror copies will persist elsewhere in the community remains to be seen.
For Canberra, and for Australian gamers and digital archivists, the implications extend beyond nostalgia. Australia's own copyright framework offers limited protection for preservation activities outside of formal library or cultural institution settings. The Australian Attorney-General's Department has reviewed copyright exceptions for cultural institutions, but the gap between what formal institutions can legally preserve and what actually needs preserving remains wide. Meanwhile, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has shown increasing interest in the market behaviour of large technology platforms, including those whose infrastructure spending reshapes hardware costs globally.
The honest conclusion here sits somewhere between the romantic vision of the archivist-hero and the strict property-rights position. Informal preservation archives fill a real cultural gap that neither markets nor governments have adequately addressed. But they operate outside the law, rely on the goodwill of a narrow donor base, and are structurally fragile in ways that Myrient's closure illustrates painfully well. The harder question, one that bodies like the Australian Law Reform Commission and equivalent overseas institutions have only begun to grapple with, is whether copyright law should carve out more robust protections for genuine preservation work, even where commercial exploitation is absent. The closure of a 390-terabyte archive is a useful, if costly, prompt to finally take that question seriously. The Australian Parliament's Library has previously examined copyright reform in the digital context; this story gives that conversation renewed urgency.