I think the parent's point was not that modern games are not worth preserving, but that the way they are implemented requires an enormous effort to preserve the

I think the parent's point was not that modern games are not worth preserving, but that the way they are implemented requires an enormous effort to preserve them far beyond the cost of just copying media, that may not be warranted for anything but the most important and well-loved of games. Most of these mobile games are continuously upgraded, and more importantly, reliant on an external service to implement purchases and access restrictions and such. You cannot just load such a game up in an emulator if the server containing half the code (yes that's hyperbole, it's a smaller but no less important amount) no longer exists. People have reimplemented the servers for very important online games in the past. Off the top of my head, Phantasy Star Online (one of the first MMOs) and Vanilla World of Warcraft both have fanmade reverse-engineered recreations of their server software that allow people to play the original game as it was when they were released, even though Sega and Blizzard respectively have long since shut down their official servers. To reiterate, they did this with only information from the game client, neither the source nor binaries of these games' server software were ever made available. I can only imagine how tremendous of an effort this must have been for the fans, but they did it out of love for these games and the time they spent playing them. Now imagine that one of the various free to play IAP games gets shut down tomorrow. Game binaries that worked fine yesterday are now useless. Chances are, no one cares nearly as much as the aforementioned MMO fans (it's a hell of a lot of work, and I'm going out on a limb and saying that skilled reverse engineers are more likely to be interested in MMOs than cow clickers), and the reverse engineered replacement never gets started. The game disappears from history, except as a Youtube video and a memory.