Spreading awareness.  This is something I'm genuinely passionate about and don't know how better to contribute.

It's always sad to lose something forever, even video games. +1 for awareness. You may also be interested in the Internet Archive, which has the Internet Arcade: https://archive.org/details/internetarcade Classic PC Games: https://archive.org/details/classicpcgames and retro ROMs: https://archive.org/details/retro-roms-best-set

also, https://delistedgames.com/ :(

Misleading clickbait. It's not that 87% of all video games ever made are "missing", it's that 87% of games ever published in the US are not commercially available on modern platforms or for modern hardware. Video games being lost to history has long been a problem, and increasingly so with the rise of the "live service" model, with little institutional will in the industry to document its own past, but this is not about that.

This is also why the "Games As A Service" model is awful - once the corporation decides to pull the plug, it's over. Can't pirate it, and even if you could it is coded to require server access to run the game's systems. So many relatively modern games are gone because of this (granted, not many were good, but still...).

With how prohibitively expensive physical media can be when it becomes old and rare, we have to preserve games so they can be played. A childhood game of mine that used to be as common as all heck during the 80s and 90s is now 180 dollars.