Germany's massive 60,000-game preservation project collapses after €1.5 million funding dries up — world's largest game archive was entirely publicly available, now abandoned just as Sony kills physical media

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The Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), a German effort to assemble the world's largest publicly accessible video game archive, is being wound down after roughly €1.5 million in public funding expired at the end of April and the federal government declined to renew it. GamesWirtschaft reported on July 3rd that the project's shareholders voted unanimously to shut it down, leaving the future of its database of more than 60,000 cataloged titles unresolved. This decision comes the same week that Sony confirmed it’s ending physical PlayStation disc production.

The ICS held more than 60,000 games spread across cartridge, floppy disk, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, alongside manuals, packaging, and hardware, assembled since 2012 from the USK (Germany's game-ratings authority), the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the industry association Game, and the University of Potsdam. Its public online catalog launched in April 2019 with tens of thousands of entries. The physical holdings remain with the institutions that own them, and whether the shared database and its infrastructure survive is under legal and technical review, according to GamesWirtschaft.