Earlier this week, Sony dropped two bombshells on the gaming industry. First, they confirmed that the digital stores for PS3 and PS Vita will shut down next year. Then, they revealed they’ll stop releasing physical disc versions of their games starting January 2028. This has already sparked heated discussions among collectors about game preservation. What’s more, two major gaming industry organizations have also clashed over this issue.
The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), which has long been dedicated to video game preservation, released a statement after the news broke, calling on industry organizations including the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) to propose a long-term solution for “legally preserving digital games,” so that game museums, libraries, and research institutions can properly preserve and study contemporary gaming culture for decades to come.
According to VGHF, while Sony’s controversial decision is undoubtedly a heavy blow to players who prefer collecting physical games, the secondhand market, retailers, and game developers who rely on physical sales, while also undermining consumer choice, the impact on professional game preservation institutions is actually not as great as the outside world imagined. However, the real problem lies in long-term preservation after digitization.
They emphasize that over the past 20 years, the vast majority of video games were not actually designed specifically for home consoles, let alone pressed onto physical media like discs or cartridges. And even when a game is released in a physical format, distribution methods like “day-one updates” have become the norm, so even if the game disc is preserved, it may not necessarily represent the version players actually played at the time. For this reason, institutions like game museums and archives should prepare for such a future, and simply keeping physical discs may not necessarily be considered the only solution for the long-term preservation of a game.
For this reason, VGHF further calls on industry organizations such as ESA to propose a more comprehensive preservation solution, enabling museums and research institutions to properly preserve modern video games for the next 50 years and beyond.
“What really puzzles us is what exactly the industry expects organizations like ours to do?” VGHF wrote in a statement.
If platform holders have already begun deciding to completely phase out physical media and traditional digital stores, then of course we would hope that trade organizations like ESA would provide archives and museums with a concrete plan for legally preserving digital content that can be researched and used in the future. Everyone agrees this would be an extremely serious problem, but ESA has consistently opposed copyright law reforms that would make this easier for cultural heritage institutions. The entertainment industry really needs to take this issue seriously, because asking museums to download a copy of GTA 6 fifty years from now and hoping the game runs smoothly is simply not a preservation solution.
Notably, VGHF consistently emphasized the importance of “legality” in this statement, because in discussions about long-term preservation, some gamers argue that piracy has actually become a way to truly preserve games, but VGHF still doesn’t seem to want this to become the final recourse.
When responding to questions from Bluesky users on Wednesday, VGHF founder Frank Cifaldi also stated that as the head of an organization dedicated to video game history preservation and as a researcher who has devoted his life to this work, this is absolutely the most accurate fact. Prior to this, they had attempted to collaborate with industry trade organizations to find a legal pathway, but unfortunately, they still refused to offer any meaningful alternatives.
In 2024, video game industry researchers filed a petition with the U.S. Copyright Office seeking an exemption that would allow them to remotely access out-of-print video games without having to physically visit a library or archive. Unfortunately, this petition was ultimately denied. VHGF strongly criticized this decision at the time, accusing ESA of allegedly lobbying U.S. copyright authorities, which they claim ultimately killed the proposal and forced researchers to seek illicit means to access those long-out-of-print games that are virtually impossible to obtain through legitimate channels.
Source: KOCPC Chinese