But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time

More feasible than it ever has been before, if not for the evil motherfucking copyright gatekeepers who would steal it all from us!

But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear?

significantly less so than video games, which are digital files that are at least for a while all stored on a companies servers

But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players

You wouldn't be copying a specific date, you'd be copying a game version. Opinions on how granular it should go vary, but in a game like FFXIV for example I'd say every major number patch. I'd quote like to go back and remember how things looked, felt, and we're back then even without the players, which are the least important part of preserving that game world to me

Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think "we are preserving culture" gives them a stronger argument.

Ah, I think I get what's happening here: video games are culture. Youre misinterpreting it as meaning "the culture around games" but we mean it literally as "a work of art/part of culture", like "high culture art" or similar phrases. People preserve paintings, why not games? Both are culture

Because they are very different problems. And conflating the two is how you end up losing masters because "there are VHSes with it on it".

You're the only person conflating them