Myrient, one of the largest online video game archives, has announced that it will shut down on March 31, 2026. According to the archive’s official Telegram page, it’s closing the service due to insufficient funding, rising costs, and abusive download managers. The creator said that donations are not keeping pace with hosting costs, and that they are paying more than $6,000 out of pocket per month to cover expenses, which is hardly sustainable.
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The creator also complained about abusive users who were monetizing Myrient content. Not only did they bypass the donation messages and the site’s built-in download protections, but they also added a paywall that defeated the site’s policy against paywalls.
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They said, “The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.”
Because of this, anyone interested only has until the end of March to download everything stored on the site. You’d need a ton of storage and a fairly fast connection if you want to do this, though, since the website itself estimates it has at least 390TB of data. What made it one of the largest repositories of classic games was that anyone was free to upload content the website needed, meaning Myrient could list a game it needed to copy for safekeeping. Millions of gamers worldwide could pitch in and submit a copy of their legally purchased title.
Fortunately, the site’s Discord server and Telegram channel will remain accessible, so there’s still a place for gamers and preservationists to come together to discuss saving their favorite titles. It also gives us hope that this archive will be revived in the near future, but the massive amount of information it holds means it will need to be funded by someone with deep pockets.
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