In my opinion the future of retro gaming, at least for popular games, is going to be dominated by open source decompilation-remakes. A few have already been released and have become the definitive way to play those games. They are simply the best version possible, free and open source:
Mario 64: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64 Zelda OoT (and others that are WIP): https://github.com/zeldaret/oot Zelda ALttP: https://github.com/snesrev/zelda3 Super Metroid: https://github.com/snesrev/sm Wipeout: https://github.com/wipeout-phantom-edition/wipeout-phantom-edition Sonic 3: https://sonic3air.org/ Jak & Daxter: https://opengoal.dev/
Those are but a few of the hundreds of such projects that have been released. PC games have benefited from such ports for a long while. A more conprehensive list can be found here:
There are countless other projects that are under developement. Give it a few years and this will become the dominant way to play games, hopefully at least. They will run on everything natively, with unprecedented features (Widescreen, 60FPS+).
They don’t necessairly. There are hundreds of examples of clean-room reverse engineered decompilations, such as the ones that I have listed. The great part is that once it’s done for one game, that game will forever be open source and perfectly preserved, able to be relatively trivially ported to any platform from the present pr future, indefinetly.