Topic: Digital Content and future retro gaming. How will this work?

Recently there has been a surge of interest in retro gaming. There are all sorts of debates on the best way to do it, but for the most part, retro gaming is highly accessible. This is because pre-internet and early internet times meant game companies had to release truly finished products. I love that we can patch games these days and download DLC, but 10, 15, 20 or more years down the road, much of this content, unless it gets re-released, is going to be only accessible to people who downloaded it while it was accessible to download. Let's take Fallout New Vegas, a game on 360, PS3 and PC. I loved that game back when it was new... after it got patched, fixing a plethora of nasty bugs. Let's say I am in the mood to relive high school and replay New Vegas in 2030 on a console. Assuming it hasn't been re-released, I would no longer be able to get the patches or DLC unless I kept all of it installed on my original system.

Or even game systems. Let's say 20 years down the road I pick up an Xbox 360 or a Wii U. Those online services will be long gone, I would be stuck with whatever versions of the OS were left on the device.

How are game companies going to deal with this? Are we going to be left high and dry? Perhaps they will release some king of legacy servers for final updates for X number of years after shutdown. What do you think will happen? Ideas?

@Heavyarms55 The platform holders and publishers don't care. They don't want you to play old consoles and games, they want you to play their newest thing.

Game companies most likely won't deal with it. It will be the community through emulation on PC. As much as some people like to pretend emulation is bad it can also be a very good thing for us. It is a form of game preservation. I guess there's also the modding community for consoles that would allow custom firmware and things of the sort but PC is much easier and more flexible.