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Yesterday, PlayStation hit fans with a double whammy of bad news, revealing that it would not only stop producing disc versions of its games by 2028 but that it also plans to close the PS3 and PS Vita digital storefronts next year.
Understandably, this has led many online to express concerns about the potential impact of such decisions on video game preservation, with a ton of obstacles standing in the way of historians and researchers accessing digital-only games long after their release: from games being delisted due to licensing reasons to entire storefronts being closed down, as will be the case with the PS3 and PS Vita in the near future.
Among the groups making their voices heard in the aftermath is the Video Game History Foundation, the non-profit organisation led by Frank Cifaldi, which has issued a statement to the press. This highlighted that these issues are by no means anything new and are something professional preservationists have had to contend with for at least two decades.
Cifaldi states, "The reality is that the vast majority of video games produced over the last two decades were not made for dedicated home video game consoles, let alone pressed to physical media. And even when they were released on physical media, a day-one digital patch was all but guaranteed, meaning that even though a disc is preserving data in an accessible way, it may not represent the game that people actually played. Museums and archives have been preparing for this future for a while, with the expectation that putting discs on a shelf isn't going to be a long-term solution for preserving new games."
This statement also went on to highlight the failure of industry trade groups like the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) to offer "meaningful solutions" for "archives and museums to legally preserve digital-only content and make it accessible for research," stating:
"What continues to baffle us is what the industry expects institutions like ours to do about it... Everyone agrees this is a serious problem, but the ESA has repeatedly opposed the efforts of cultural heritage institutions to reform digital copy protection laws to make it easier to do this work.
"The industry needs to meaningfully come to the table on this issue, because asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it'll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution."
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has famously opposed broad protection exemptions for video game preservation.
This included lobbying against an attempt by the Software Preservation Network (supported by the Video Game History Foundation) to petition the US Copyright Office in 2024 for an exemption allowing libraries and archives to provide private remote access to digital games without researchers having to visit their premises.
At the time, the ESA's legal representative, Steve Englund, told the US Copyright Office, "I don’t think there is at the moment any combination of limitations that ESA members would support to provide remote access," stating, "The preservation organisations want a great deal of discretion to handle very valuable intellectual property. They have yet to… show a willingness on their part in a way that might be comforting to the owners of that IP.”
This situation has led some online to suggest piracy "is the only extant form of media preservation that exists in games right now", to which Cifaldi responded on his personal account, "As the director of a historical video game preservation institution, and someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to this cause, this is accurate. We have attempted to work with the industry's trade organisation to find a legal path forward, but they refuse to offer a meaningful alternative."