There is a particular irony in the fact that artificial intelligence, the technology everyone insists will save the world, is now expensive enough to kill a volunteer-run gaming archive that nobody was even trying to shut down. That is precisely what happened to Myrient, one of the largest retro game repositories on the internet, which will go dark on 31 March 2026.
The site's sole operator, known only as Alexey, announced the closure via Discord and Telegram late last week. Myrient, a retro-focused archive with over 390 terabytes of organised collections, has operated ad-free, paywall-free, and login-free since it launched in October 2022, relying on a small pool of donations to stay online. That model, admirable in its accessibility, turned out to be structurally fragile.
Three reasons, one brutal outcome
Alexey listed three compounding pressures. First, donations failed to keep pace with rising traffic: the operator has been covering a monthly deficit of more than $6,000 USD out of pocket. Second, a wave of specialised download managers emerged that completely bypassed the site, its donation messages, and its download protections, with some locking features behind a paywall — a commercial use that Myrient explicitly prohibits. Third, and most striking, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically since last September due to extreme demand from AI datacenters, pushing Myrient's hosting expenses up and making necessary upgrades to its storage and caching infrastructure unaffordable.
As Kotaku first reported, the combined weight of those three factors proved unsurmountable. What is exceptional here is that it was not a threatening letter or DMCA takedown that ended Myrient, but the unprecedented strain on hardware prices caused by AI datacenter construction. For a site operating in legally contested territory, that is a genuinely novel cause of death.
The memory market in freefall
The hardware cost problem Myrient encountered is not specific to gaming archives. It reflects a much larger structural shift in global memory markets. The AI shortage is driven, in part, by a reallocation of manufacturing capacity away from consumer electronics toward high-margin memory solutions for AI datacenters; major memory makers have shifted production toward high-bandwidth memory and high-capacity DDR5, restricting the supply of general-purpose modules.
According to Counterpoint Research, server DRAM prices are on track to double by late 2026. Costs had already climbed roughly 50 per cent through 2025, with analysts forecasting a further 30 per cent surge in late 2025 and another 20 per cent in early 2026. That kind of sustained price escalation flows directly into the bills paid by anyone running servers at scale, including small operators like Alexey with no enterprise leverage to negotiate.
The Register reported separately that German datacenter giant Hetzner is hiking prices by up to 37 per cent from 1 April, a ripple effect that illustrates how even mid-tier infrastructure providers are absorbing and passing on the memory crunch. Meanwhile, scalpers are actively worsening supply conditions: security firm DataDome found that bots have been hitting DRAM product pages on e-commerce sites at nearly six times the rate of legitimate users, hoovering up available stock for resale at inflated prices.
In late 2025, the global semiconductor ecosystem entered an unprecedented memory chip shortage with knock-on effects for device manufacturers and end users that analysts warn could persist well into 2027. Western Digital has already sold out its entire hard-drive production run for 2026, with the bulk of supply allocated to large enterprise customers.
What actually gets lost
The copyright status of ROM-sharing sites like Myrient is genuinely contested, and it would be dishonest to paper over that. Game publishers' legal departments are rarely sympathetic to the preservationist defence, and distributing so-called abandonware without the express consent of its copyright holders is legally questionable. Critics of the site's self-description as a "preservation service" have a point worth hearing: preservation, in a legally coherent sense, generally requires the permission of rights holders or a specific legislative exemption.
That said, there is a real cultural loss here that sits alongside the legal ambiguity. Myrient grouped content into large preservation-style categories including No-Intro cartridge sets, Redump optical disc sets, arcade sets like MAME and FinalBurn Neo, and other large archives including a Total DOS Collection. Many of those titles are commercially unavailable, and what made the site one of the largest repositories of classic games was that anyone was free to upload content, meaning the community could pitch in with copies of legitimately purchased titles.
The pragmatic answer for retro gaming fans is to look to legitimate alternatives. Storefronts like GOG have long championed DRM-free access to older games, and publishers who genuinely care about legacy titles have that avenue available to them. For everything else, the closure of Myrient is a reminder that the internet's informal preservation layer is thinner and more fragile than it looks, and that AI infrastructure costs are now powerful enough to tear holes in it without anyone sending a single legal letter.