They could just actually sell things instead. As in, sell for real, not some at-our-discretion lease. Nobody's forcing companies to gate access and add DRM and all that. Such a change probably wouldn't result in perpetual hosting, but in actually selling things. Or, in only providing rentals. Either way, the situation would be clearer to the end user.

I forced a book publisher to re-host videos on a particular CDN using the exact same URL’s because they advertised that the book came with videos, but the QR codes stopped working. Can’t imagine that was fun or cheap to fix.

I made a complaint to the advertising standards authority in the UK. They agreed with my complaint and forced the publisher to get the URL’s working again. I’m not sure how long they will keep working, but I imagine they have to at least for as long as the book is in print.

Not the EU, but I imagine the EU has a lot more clout than the ASA does.

It doesn't have to be quite as simplistic. You can give them choices. There could be IP escrow companies you could pay. You can give them the choice of hosting in perpetuity or releasing something on some date. You can tie all these choices to a tax structure, progressive charges, etc. You could make the cheapest thing to simply sell the product outright. In theory you could even tie these additional protections to the a condition of making the release public at some point as a way of incentivizing companies not to use copyright protection on something that is not likely to be that valuable in 95 years, though that's unrealistically utopian of me to suggest.

My main point is that it doesn't have to be that simplistic.

Companies going out of business is a different thing but Amazon, Google, and Epic are not in any risk of going out of business.

If you're worried about shell-company games, well, that can be legislated against too. So far the EU hasn't, as far as I'm aware, let any companies out of any previously-mandated penalties for violating consumer protection with "That was google, this is ABC" bullshit. They are, as I stated, much much less interested in playing games than the US is.

Easy- revoke copyright protection.

Your "software X" is not worth hosting any more? Fine, then someone else can host it, maybe they will find it profitable.

Maybe even it could be a former employee.

EU isn’t that unfair for companies, it is more likely that they would allow revoking of access rights, but require companies to compensate for thr damages (e.g. issue a refund for the full or partial purchase amount)

Just keeping it online wouldn't be hard for most companies and most items sold.

If something is under pretty active use, that should have been in the original budget, but also you can put it on cloudflare R2.

For the long tail of perpetuity, you can pay Hetzner $1200 a year for a server with 45TB (plus parity) and a gigabit port.