Today, Sony announced that it was ending production of physical PlayStation discs and shutting down the PS3 and Vita stores. I think that's something of a nightmare from a consumer perspective, but what does it mean for proper historians and preservationists? It's less damaging than you might think, actually, because they've been preparing for this eventuality for some time. The problem is that the game industry still won't budge on legislative effort to make preserving digital games legal.
"This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media," Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi says in a statement on social media, "and is certainly a hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market. But from the perspective of professional preservationists, this doesn't have as much of an impact as you might expect."
While many players conflate the work of game preservation with ensuring that old games remain available to modern players – the sort of thing movements like Stop Killing Games are all about – that kind of consumer-focused effort is a very small part of what game preservation is about. The reality is that the vast majority of retail video games have already been kept from disappearing thanks to piracy. That's hardly an ideal solution, of course, but it does mean that museums don't really feel an urgent need to put their resources into, say, making sure the NES version of Super Mario Bros. is protected for future generations.
"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," Cifaldi continues. "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 speaks to just how broad the field of game history really is. Most players only care about making sure they can continue to play their favorite games years into the future, which is fair enough. But who's tracking the history of, say, browser games, a very important part in the evolution of modern video games? What about the mobile games that have been disappearing from iOS and Android for years? Who's making sure the world knows about the development of the hentai visual novel scene on Steam?
Those games were always digital-only releases, and if one is delisted from sale, there's suddenly no legal way to access it. That will soon be the case even for massive launches like GTA 6. Museums and historians in particular need legal legitimacy for their work, and spent years fighting for a DMCA exemption that would allow them to preserve digital games. That proposal, opposed by game industry lobby groups, was denied by the US copyright office in 2024.
"What continues to baffle us is what the industry expects institutions like ours to do about it," Cifaldi concludes in today's statement. "If platform owners are deciding to eliminate physical media and older digital storefronts, then we'd also like to see trade groups like the Entertainment Software Association offer meaningful solutions for archives and museums to legally preserve digital-only content and make it accessible for research.
"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."
PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, whether you care about physical games or not.
