What games? ;)

I guess not much right now ... (especially goes for Vita) 

But we want to get started ASAP for Vita since there's so few hardware and it's software in circulation left ... 

Just bad argument ... 

What do you do when the said physical copies of the game are non-functional and what do you do when digital copies aren't being distributed anymore ? 

No physical copies, and no distrubution won't happen until over a decade after a game's release. I fully support the emulation of defunct and ancient game systems. The problem is that people are kidding themselves when they think that pirating a game on day one, is somehow contributing to saving said games. Is the guy who hacks movies while they are still in the theatre contributing to the preservation of said movie? 

Just because there exists a digital format that is legally distributed is not a guarantee their propogation and neither should we assume that hardware lifespan is infinite either so emulation is an absolute necessity to experience those content and maybe piracy too ... (What do we do if there's no legal copies in circulation left ?)

No legal copies in circulation left? That almost never happens, and won't happen for the vast majority of games until most of the posters on these forums are elderly citizens.

And steam games absolutely need to be saved in case Valve Corporation's servers shutdown ... (How are we going to redownload the games we deleted before too ?)

At least you're consistent about it. Props for that. Let's suppose Steam shuts down tomorrow and never comes back up. Would it be impossible to get the files for the games that are still on many people's harddrives and hack them? For example: I have Darkest Dungeon on my PC via steam. If my PC were the last surviving harddrive on earth with Darkest Dungeon still on it, wouldn't there be a way for future historians to salvage the contents of my PC harddrive, thus saving the game? What about PS4 harddrives? 

I suppose there's the Vita version of Muramasa, plus all the dlc for it.

Freedom Wars and Soul Sacrifice

P4G, but that's already a rerelease.

I mean, there's just not a lot for it. Most of its library is dumbed down PS3/PS4 games, PSP/PS1 games, and remasters of some PS2 games.

I imagine games exclusive to the playstation ecosystem that are on the Vita is worth emulating and it goes for some remasters such as P4G ...

I imagine games exclusive to the playstation ecosystem that are on the Vita is worth emulating and it goes for some remasters such as P4G ...

You might have a point that day one pirates are offenders but they're literally the imperceptible minority when the most desirable games to pirate are AAA console games that needs some pretty expensive PC hardware to run those said games today ...

There's an MTBF of physical copies storing the content too ... (If your digitally copy corrupts you're shit out of luck too, you might have to also keep the hard drive with the motherboard intact too depending on the EULA as well.) 

I'm pretty sure stealing a copy or copying of someone's copy of copyrighted content is illegal ... (And historians could most definitely do the same for PS4 since their hard drive technology is no different than that of PCs when PS4 supports FAT32 and exFAT file systems which is also supported on PC beyond Windows too!) 

Wait, I thought this was for preservation?

Emulation is a part of the preservation process ... (There's other ways to go about it too.) 

Publishers could decide to rerelease content but would prefer open community rather than depending on the whims of businesses instead ...

Yeah and what is the MTBF of physical games? If your pirated copy corrupts you are also out of luck. What's to stop people from sharing digital PS4 files long after PSN for the PS4 goes down, in the same way that people share pirated games? What's to stop poeple from getting around any built in EULA features in the future, for either PC or PS4 games released now? 

So what you're saying is, that historians could easily copy the digital version of a PS4 game from a harddrive. But every PS4 has a digital version on the harddrive. Once the disk is inserted the PS4 works on saving the entire game to the harddrive. 

You had to refresh in the 10 seconds between me posting that and realizing it was dumb, huh?