Video Game Preservation Has Become an Industry Urgency
While video games are a relatively young media form, the need to save its history is surprisingly urgent. And with the rise of always-online and subscription-based gaming, game preservationists’ focus is expanding to include the present as well as the past.
This April started with Ubisoft shutting down the servers for “The Crew,” making the online-only racing game completely inaccessible for its over 12 million regular players. A few days later, Nintendo shut off their online servers for the WiiU and 3DS, wiping out features such as online multiplayer, following the shutdown of the consoles’ respective eShop platforms last year, which made 1,000 digital-only games disappear for good.
To cap off the eventful month, the United States Library of Congress Copyright Office held a hearing for a proposal that would grant video game researchers remote access to archived games. Representing the Entertainment Software Association, attorney Steve Englund said that until preservationists operate “in a way that might be comforting to the owners of that valuable intellectual property,” the ESA will not support any exempted access.
These events are only the latest examples of the gaming industry’s tendency to discard its past and block third-party efforts to save it. A July 2023 report by the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network found that only 13% of video games released before 2010 are still commercially available — on par with pre-WWII audio recordings (10%) and silent films (14%) — due to factors of licensing difficulties, low commercial value and volatile digital marketplaces.