Well, that's the problem. The more advanced the hardware becomes with each generation, the more components that have the capacity to fail. Not to mention machines that were manufactured cheaply like the early versions of the Xbox 360 that are guaranteed not to last into the future. Machines like the Dreamcast, with its faulty capacitors that kill the controller ports, or the laser that goes out on the PS1, they're all built to die eventually since they have moving parts. But the great thing is, there are all sorts of people out there coming up with solutions to aging hardware. Like replacing the CD drive on a PS1 with a memory card. True, there's a difficulty curve to installing new hardware into old machines, a little intimidating if you aren't proficient at soldering (like me), but at least these options are out there and we seem to be getting more and more of them as time goes on. I personally am not going to worry about it, with backwards compatability and virtual stores (not to mention emulation) there's always going to be a way to play old games.