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On March 12, 2026, Pirat_Nation posted on X, stating that Myrient was 100% backed by the community. On March 5, I wrote an article about the closure of Myrient and the potential destruction of some 390 TB of data, all of which was focused on preserving video games from retro consoles, computers, and other systems. The site maintained a massive repository of games, game-related data, and more, which gamers could download and preserve. Myrient announced it was shutting down on March 31, 2026, forcing its users to scramble to download whatever they could, but 390 TB is a LOT of data.
Myrient’s Users Saved All of Its Data
Pirat_Nation’s post is excellent news for fans of video game preservation. It reads, “Good news, Myrient has been 100% backed up by the community. It’s a major video game preservation archive hosting over 390 terabytes of organized ROMs, ISOs, and collections that is shutting down on March 31, 2026.” The post doesn’t expand on how it was preserved, by how many people, nor where the data now resides. The closure of Myrient sent shockwaves through the preservation community because it was the largest online repository of these files. Unfortunately, it also cost its host $6,000 in monthly fees, a major reason for its closure.
On top of the cost and insufficient funding needed to keep it going, other issues arose, including paywalled download managers. These bypassed donation request messages and download protections, locking some features behind a paywall, and it’s made clear on the site that “The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.” Additionally, the rising cost of RAM, SSDs, and HDDs, driven by AI data centers buying them up, has made it impossible to keep the site running.
