recent,Myrient, one of the world's largest classic online game archives, officially announced that it will completely cease service on March 31, 2026.. This player's treasure trove, which contains a full 390TB of classic game data, is about to come to an end. According to the announcement on its official page, insufficient funds, rising operating costs, and abusive behavior by some users were the three main factors that crushed it.
The website creator admitted,The donations received now cannot keep up with the increase in server hosting costs. Every month, we have to spend more than 6,000 US dollars out of our own pockets to fill the operating hole. Such a burden has long been unbearable and cannot be sustained for a long time.
What's more terrible is,Nowadays, the construction of AI infrastructure is booming. The prices of global memory, solid-state drives and mechanical hard drives are rising all the time. Myrient's hosting costs are also rising accordingly.
This dilemma is not unique to Myrient. German data center giant Hetzner also recently announced that it will raise the prices of all products and services starting from April 1. Cloud services in Germany and Finland have increased by 30% to 38%, and some dedicated servers in the United States have also increased by about 30%. This is the second price increase for this company this month. In the final analysis, the cost of hardware procurement has increased too much.
Myrient also said that the website’s storage and caching equipment should have been upgraded long ago, but due to the shortage of memory chips, storage equipment, and unstable prices, they simply cannot afford the upgrade.
In addition to cost pressure, users’ abusive behavior makes operators even worse. The website creator complained that some users were making shady money through Myrient's content. They not only skipped the website's donation prompts and built-in download protection, but also set up a paywall privately, which directly violated the website's original intention of prohibiting commercial distribution.
The operator made it clear in the announcement: "Myrient has never been allowed to be used for commercial profit. We can no longer tolerate this kind of excessive abuse."
This means that all players and game preservation enthusiasts who are interested in these game contents have less than a month (as of the end of March) left to download all the data on the website.
However, it is not easy to preserve these contents completely. According to Myrient official estimates, the total amount of data on the website is at least 390TB, which requires a large enough storage space and an ultra-fast network. It is an almost impossible task for ordinary players.
As one of the largest classic game archives in the world, Myrient cannot achieve the scale it does today without the support of players around the world.Its core advantage is its open upload mode. Anyone can freely upload the games the website needs. Myrient will list the games that need to be saved. Millions of players around the world can actively submit copies of their legally purchased games. Over time, such a huge treasure trove of game data has been accumulated.
Fortunately, Myrient’s Discord server and Telegram channel will not be shut down along with the website and will continue to be open. This means that players and game preservation enthusiasts around the world have a place where they can gather and communicate, and continue to discuss how to preserve classic games that carry memories of everyone’s youth.
This has also given many players hope of restarting it, but with 390TB of massive data, if you want to restart it, someone with strong financial resources will need to inject capital. As for whether it can be restarted in the future, it is hard to say yet.