Recently the Myrient game video archive announced that they’re shutting down on March 31st of this year, for a couple of reasons, but primarily the skyrocketing financial costs of hosting the archive. One advantage of Myrient over e.g. Archive.org is that – per the FAQ – every game on the site is curated and checked against a checksum of a known good copy. The site also focuses on fast downloads, making it a good resource if you’re trying to find ROMs of some more obscure old gaming system.
Amidst the mourning it seems also pertinent to address the reasons behind this shutdown. Although finances are the main reason for this hobby project to be shut down, it’s due to (paywalled) download managers that have recently appeared, and which completely bypass the donation requests and similar on the website. Despite use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes having always been explicitly forbidden, this has been ignored to the point where the owner of Myrient had to shell out over $6,000 per month to cover the difference after donations.
Along with the rising costs of hosting due to rising storage and RAM prices courtesy of AI datacenter buildouts, this has meant that a hobby archive like this has become completely unsustainable. Barring good ways to block illegal traffic like these download tools and/or a surge in donations, it would seem that all archives like this are at risk of shutting down, along with other sites that contain commercially interesting content.
Sh!t. How am I just now finding out about this site now that it’s being shut. Damn….that’s a shame.
My thoughts exactly…I’ve got some extra storage kicking around. I might have to grab some subsets. I thought I’d have plenty of storage for everything, but he says hes got 390 TB of content! Nope, I can’t mirror all of that…
Not at current hard drive prices. Maybe he can cold storage them at Amazon till things get figured out.
That would still be like $400 a month plus data transfer fees. There’s no cheap way of storing 390 TB.
The best option would probably be LTO-9 tape if you could get access to a drive. That would be around $2500 worth of tape and it would be good for 20+ years if properly stored.
Things aren’t going to be “figured out,” unfortunately.
Mega-expensive RAM, hardware, et al are the “new normal,” to quote the dominant narrative of the past six years. Those not at the top will have no say in this in the silicon era. Cheers.
~~guy at top-middle of a resource-accumulation cartel.
I’d have to delete the porn to make that much room.
only some of it though
Indeed, I’d not heard of this one either.
I wonder if there is enough interest here at HAD and from the existing users panicking at the shut down message to at least fund a proper offline archive – I’d be more than happy to pay to go visit with a disk to collect for the content I’m interested in with something like this, and I suspect so would many others. And that way the cost drops to just maintaining a suitable environment to keep the tape’s alive.
everything is always at risk of being shut down. support stuff if you want it to stick around.
Another victim on this AI hype cycle bubble. It’s a shame those involved will not fall too far financially once it’s all over.
I agree totally!! They should burn for what they are doing. But they will totally devastate the world job market and walk away scot free after losing a HUGE fortune for investors.
the irony being that AI could have learned so much from this resource…
AI learn from binaries for old games?
I think a re-write / modification to the site can help curb some of the garbage traffic . Projects such as https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis are supposed to help. Make the ‘client’ do some proof-of-work before being granted a download link. I’d be ok to sit and grind for 30s or so for a download link.
Financing through bitcoin.
Talk about dying for your principles…no account required, premium servers/speeds, multiple concurrent downloads, no delays between files, allows download managers….of course it’s getting abused.
Holding up high principles for access to the extent that it forces you to shut down and now there’s NO access…is just stupid.
Force people to create accounts to download. Limit download speeds for people who don’t donate. Cap people who don’t donate at 1 download a day. Stop allowing multiple concurrent downloads, and maybe, just maybe, drop “high end servers” from your feature list.
Problem solved, within a week.
Frankly this just seems like a donation-solication ploy? “many small other reasons” – buddy, nothing stopped you from soliciting volunteers to help run the site.
This reminds me – is the other big video game CD archive site still hamstrung by the guy who refuses to do anything? And also refuses to give the other admins and mods any rights to be able to do more since he refuses to?
never heard of, but they do host ExoDos
They also host the 3DS hShop.
So their well promoted features and 390TB of data are the Achilles heel that brings them down.
No surprise there.
If you want to run a service for free always plan for unexpected popularity.
Hope is not a strategy.
Banking on the goodness of the people you serve is a lifestyle I personally cannot shame. I hope they didn’t lose too much. I also wish I would have heard about this sooner because I would have donated.
Indeed. Though in this case perhaps they went a bit overboard on providing an expensive service level without really explaining the costs incurred when a far cheaper method would do the job just fine. For instance share the data costs by making the files only available through torrents and the website simply runs the database to find those torrent files – then those downloading the data are likely to share a reasonable fraction of the upload to other clients and if your costs are too high you can throttle your upload speed – have a nice big marker on the webpage giving the current donations budget available before everyone has throttled speeds to make ends meet etc.
I always thought as the hosting is clearly linked to the storage quantity, that it could always have been viable if they had limited the scope to a smaller subset (like they did before with hshop) as CDN storage is expensive, but for example the PS3/360/Wii generation take a large majority of the space, while smaller older generations will get sunk with the ship too.
Please reach out to Gog, see if they might want to help or take over the library
Some of the reason why they are doing this is partly because of our community. We are blessed to have a person who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on a site for the well-being of us, and some people, like me, can’t donate to him or just don’t want to. And some people hack the site and do all kinds of crazy things to it that interferes with people using the site. And not just us, it’s also the AI bubble and prices. If the founder has to pay over $6k per month, he’s paying $72k a year, that’s a heck ton of money, and some people at least donate to him, but it’s still not enough. There’s Also AI like ChatGPT, with ram and storage increasing in price and decrease in items, it’s going to interfere with the cost and the founder spending $100k a year, and it could increase the more this goes on. Really, this is a better option financially, and while older games might be lost for some, you should look at the founder’s perspective if you are mad about it. Holy yap I just did…