When i was a kid in the early 2000s, i remember using this service called PlayNow. It was a software that acted as a hub for emulated games and a download manager at the same time. You could choose a console you wanted to emulate, then it would open a list to available games. The program would then connect to some dedicated server and download it for you if you never played it before. Pretty neat for its time.
One day, still in the 2000s, the program simply stopped working. I was reminiscing about it and now i'm wondering about it's story exactly. Who made this? Why did it stop working all of a sudden? Are the developers up to anything nowadays?
It seems the whole thing is fairly obscure, too. The developers seem to go by simply the name "PlayNow Games" but searching this on Google yields nothing but gambling site ads. Besides that, all i could find about it in the internet is people recommending the software through old forums and blogs, a very few pictures, and some still active download links, which are now useless, since the program doesn't work anymore.
Here's a picture of what its main menu looks like
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/oldgames/comments/szpzgv/playnow_games_an_old_retroarchish_program_does/