While preserving binary “playability” is important, the rapidly increasing longevity of titles and fighting bit-rot is an equally large challenge for both the game and software industry.

A game is rarely just the binary execution itself, but often depends on an interconnected mesh of services and downstream partners - most of which are rarely set-up/committed to multi-decade durability, especially as the surface area of problem domain, and actors/threats have grown. For example, who’d willingly port a service that only worked on Centos 5, with SHA1 hashed TLS, or the CDN service that your game update assets were delivered from in 2007.

The techniques to isolate a game from its gradually crumbling ecosystem are an after-thought when priorities are survive to shipping. I’m not inferring this is right or wrong, just indicating that it is not even in the calculus on the path to shipping.