One of the internet's most comprehensive retro game repositories is counting down its final weeks, and a small army of volunteers is racing to stop decades of gaming history from disappearing permanently. Myrient, a self-described "video game preservation service" that has operated since 2022, will go dark on 31 March 2026. Its operator, known as Alexey, says the finances simply no longer add up.
The numbers tell a stark story. Alexey was paying more than $6,000 out of pocket per month to cover expenses, with donations failing to keep pace with rising traffic. Founded in October 2022, Myrient had remained ad-free, paywall-free, and login-free since it first emerged three years ago, relying on a small pool of donations to keep the site online. That model, generous as it was, always depended on users pulling their weight. Most did not.
The AI Cost Squeeze Hits Home
The proximate cause of the blow-out in hosting costs is one tech commentators have been watching build for months. Since last September, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically due to the ongoing extreme demand for AI datacenters, pushing Myrient's hosting expenses higher as well. German hosting provider Hetzner, a major player in European infrastructure, is reportedly hiking prices by up to 37% from April 1, a signal of how broadly these cost pressures are spreading through the industry. Myrient said it needed "necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure," which it could not afford due to memory chip and storage shortages.
To be clear, AI infrastructure costs were not the only culprit. In the months before closure, many specialised download managers were created that completely bypassed the site, donation messages, and download protections; some locked features behind a paywall requiring users to pay for access. The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes had always been strictly forbidden, and the operator said such usage could no longer be tolerated. In other words, a subset of users found ways to profit from a free community resource while cutting off the donations that kept it alive. That is not a technical failure; it is a failure of individual responsibility.
Project Minerva: Hundreds of Hands on Deck
The response from the preservation community has been immediate. Minerva is a volunteer-driven effort to archive Myrient's entire collection before it goes offline, asking contributors to "run a script, share your bandwidth, help preserve the archive." The project distributes the work across hundreds of volunteers worldwide; each worker downloads files from Myrient and uploads them to Minerva's archival servers, with the site rate-limited so that sheer numbers matter.
As reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, volunteers had archived around 208,200 of a target 2.8 million files at the time of writing, placing the project at roughly 7.3% of its goal with weeks remaining. A more recent figure from The Gamer suggests the group has since secured approximately 200TB of Myrient's total data. The Minerva Archive website hosts a live progress tracker, with coordination happening through a dedicated Discord server.
The Preservation Question Is Not Simple
It would be easy to frame Myrient purely as a heroic underdog crushed by corporate AI greed. The reality is more layered. The legality of what Myrient did is questionable; like many sites hosting ROMs and classic games, it did not have permission from original rights holders. Even distributing "abandonware" without the express consent of its copyright holders is legally questionable.
The strongest counterargument from preservation advocates is also worth taking seriously. Sites like Myrient play an important role in preservation because many IP holders no longer exist, and their games would be at risk of being lost forever; many titles are also unlikely to be re-released due to the expiration of decades-old licensing deals. Respected digital archivist Jason Scott Sadofsky, best known for his work with the Internet Archive and as a co-founder of Archive Team, has engaged directly with the Minerva community. Scott hopes the community will identify what is genuinely rare and "give it over to something like Hidden Palace or Video Game Preservation Collective," prioritising truly unique material for broad accessibility.
What is exceptional here is that it was not a threatening letter or DMCA takedown that ended Myrient; it is the unprecedented strain on hardware prices caused by AI data centre construction. That distinction matters for the broader conversation about how AI development's resource consumption flows downstream to affect unrelated corners of the internet. Volunteer-run, donation-funded services operating on thin margins are the most exposed. Myrient will not be the last.
There is genuine complexity in what Project Minerva is doing. The copyright questions do not disappear because a site is shutting down. At the same time, the loss of access to games whose publishers no longer exist, and which will never see a legitimate re-release, is a real cultural cost. Reasonable people can hold both of those truths at once. The more pressing practical question is whether the internet's growing dependence on a handful of infrastructure providers, whose pricing is increasingly dictated by AI demand, makes fragile, independent archiving projects structurally unviable going forward. That question deserves serious policy attention, regardless of where you land on the ROM debate. Anyone wishing to help can visit the Minerva Archive or learn more about digital preservation through the Internet Archive.