Well, then I disagree with the guy because he doesn’t go far enough.

I mean, I disagree with you, because the stuff on his website and on his Youtube channel does not at any point claim that live service games should be allowed to go offline.

But I don’t care if he says it, I’m saying it: live games should be preserved in some form.

For the record, games came with the ability to host your own server when the server was not handling matchmaking and handling discrete games with a beginning, an end and a handful of players.

That is still very much a thing. In some cases you can self-host servers (Terraria, since it’s in the news today), in others you can rent a server (Conan Exiles, if I remember correctly).

But what you can’t do there is run global matchmaking or have oversight over the entire game. This isn’t a problem of “writing the server software”, it’s a problem of having a centralized infrastructure to handle the parts of the game that aren’t related to an individual session. “Server software” doesn’t come in interchangeable “server software units” you can exchange or move from wherever the developer is hosting them to a local computer. That’s not an easy transition to make. That’s where saying things like these starts making devs scoff at you and stop taking you seriously.

But that doesn’t mean I’m fine with those live service games dependent on a larger infrastructure going away entirely. I do want to find a form of storage and preservation for them. Maybe that form means they’re still not playable at all times for people who paid for them, but I do care about them as cultural artifacts existing in some form.