Physical archives have literally worked for thousands of years.
You do have a point in that commercial ventures like Embracer don’t tend to last for very long. Presumably the collection would not be auctioned off piecemeal if the company goes under, but rather sold as a unit to some other entity.
No, the OP is right, although perhaps for the wrong reasons.
In a 100 (or a few hundred) years none of the games from that physical archive will be playable, as both the physical media and the physical consoles needed to play those games will become unusable. Physical archives work only as long as the physical medium itself lasts.
The only way to actually preserve games is to digitize them. Period. Collecting physical media and consoles is a fun hobby, but in the long term it's completely useless if the goal is preservation. If you want to preserve games you should be dumping whatever undumped games still exist, contribute to databases like no-intro.org, and download and seed/share what has already been dumped. This is what will help preserve those games, not a physical collection that will turn into an unusable paperweight sooner or later.
I know you’re right, but my intuition is that there are not a huge number of games in that collection which have never been dumped to digital.
I see some value in preserving the physical artifacts. These games are not only the medium and its content. Most have boxes with artwork, many have manuals, even “feelies”. If all we had was archive.org then those would be lost to the sands of time.
You do have a point in that commercial ventures like Embracer don’t tend to last for very long. Presumably the collection would not be auctioned off piecemeal if the company goes under, but rather sold as a unit to some other entity.