As more and more games go online exclusively - many MMO, we can look forward to a future, where old games will be unplayable.

Once there is no more money in a game, the online services will be closed down, and the game will be unplayable.

In the future, you can not with nostalgia in your heart load up some of the old games. Future developers will not even be able to go back and play older games for inspiration or learning.

The future development of games may become disconnected from its past, as games are lost, and can no longer be learned from.

(edit: correction of headline, added the last sentence)

i am afraid you are right. just yesterday i saw an announcement, that Ubisoft is developing Silent Hunter Online (submarine simulation) with a closed beta this summer. they have shut down support for Silent Hunter 5 long time ago, even if the game was buggy and incomplete. and now the future is a new F2P browser game based on Flash 11. the developers are the same that did The Settlers Online, a famous RTS, similar to Age of Empires Online; and Civilization will go online,too.

also a lot of single player RPGs go with Steam these days, and have a multiplayer component. so the way is CRPG, and from there the the next step is MMORPG.

however, i dont see such a dark future like you. some games will shut down, because it is not longer economical to run the servers, or the company itself went bankrupt. but some games will run for a long time especially the browser games, perhaps longer than you usually can play your old games today. i cant play Daggerfall today, because i would need the old operating system. and emulators dont work properly for me. some games will run on private shards like Ultima Online, and i hope more companies will support this model as the last option for a dying game, after even F2P does not work anymore.

so the trend is obvious. you are right. but we dont know yet, where it leads.

I was just thining the same thing about a week ago while playing the new SSX.

On the bright side, it means I'll be focusing my retro-gaming dollar on my happy place in gaming, the 8-bit/16-bit console eras.

I'd love to expand my Turbo-Grafx 16 collection a bit more.

You never own the game you bought. 

you own the license to play it. The game still belongs to the developer.

Well, not me.

I simply dont buy games who would need an online service in the first place. Thats a dealbreaker for me. Except if its really a MMO.

I brought back Half Life 2 and I havent bothered with Skyrim and all the other games like that.

Besides, there is something that we are probably not allowed to talk about here, which is still a possibility to play a game that needs online service offline anytime.

Also, theres sometimes nice companies like Bethesda who release their old games for free.