Maybe I’m perpetuating outdated wisdom here, but my understanding is that HDDs can prevent data rot without being powered and accessed for 10 years, an SSD for a few months to a few years, and magnetic tape storage lasts far longer (archival usage).
By data transfer, I meant read/write speed, sorry.
Free to play is always unsustainable without microtransactions unless the game is community hosted or open source. That doesn’t represent the overwhelming majority of F2P.