Why does digital ownership and game preservation matter?

The video game industry is fast moving and quick to adapt to the times and zeitgeist of society. The trend now is towards streaming content and owning digital copies. However video game historians and longtime gamers alike have been sounding the alarm for what this means for physical games and ownership of digital games that can easily be de-listed or pulled from digital stores.

If you’re clued into gaming and have been a gamer for a while, you’ve probably already seen the changing tides over the decades from game cartridges to discs and in more recent years to fully digital versions of games. Said digital versions only exist electronically, though are usually tied to a gaming account (eg a personal Steam or Xbox account). Physical games exist in the real world, they sit on your desks or tables and unless you sell them will always exist, though physical games aren’t immune to access issues either and a study from the Video Game History Foundation found that a massive 87 per cent of classic games can’t be accessed.

The accessibility of modern games is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand it’s easier than ever to play games from a generation or two ago, with backwards compatibility on an Xbox Series X for instance, but at the same time it’s easier than ever for companies to pull servers of older games or remove them entirely from gaming stores.

And due to their nature, once digital games are gone, they’re gone forever, unlike physical games. Game preservation as a movement aims to preserve games of this nature so they can be accessed in the future. And for game publishers and studios, doing so will prevent people having to pirate and emulate games as the only other means to play them—this is particularly done with older Nintendo games, much to the company’s annoyance.  

The question of whether this matters may be asked and it’s a fair one, but in an age of streaming and digital “ownership”, as consumers we may want to look more into the entertainment we consume and what we really “own”. Despite being seen as a niche hobby in the past, video games have been legitimised in popular culture in the last 20-25 years and are now very much seen as mainstream and normal. Video games are not just rising in popularity as a pastime but in terms of careers—with avenues like games journalism, animators, software developers, and several other internal industry roles. There are also public-facing roles like professional gaming or being a full-time game streamer.

As far as gaming goes, the industry can be prone to moving quickly and not preserving cultural touchstones—important and popular games that naturally fall out of the spotlight over time. Ecosystems and platforms get moved on from but preserving game titles can be seen as something of importance, allowing newer generations to play classic games they previously had no access to.

Older games can also act as a source of inspiration, entertainment and a part of culture. As generations of people can attest to having game consoles handed down to them as they grew up, with modern game consoles and digital games, this may well start to become a thing of the past if older games start being removed altogether from digital stores.

The video game industry is still one of the more recent global industries, existing as we know it only since the 1980s. In that time, there have been several generations of game consoles, handhelds and tens of thousands of games. Preserving video games is an understandably huge task that does take a lot of effort but it is something that the industry should be looking into if gamers and their satisfaction remain a priority.

The unexpected reality is that the issue of access doesn’t apply exclusively to retro games and certain titles from ten years ago or even more recently can and have been disappearing completely. Studios do regularly take down game servers or de-list them from digital stores entirely, with studios like EA being quite notorious for doing this. Here is a list of de-listed legacy Ubisoft games from recent years as an example.

One thing that studios can do is remake their older games for modern consoles, as developer Capcom has been doing with the popular Resident Evil franchise. But naturally not every studio may be interested in investing time and money in doing this, and may favour making sequels to build on successful series or entirely new games to appeal to more people.

There are a few video game archivists that out in the world that exist solely to preserve games as best as they can, including the Video Game History Foundation. Aiming to advocate for preserving games, educate on gaming history and physically preserving games and consoles.

The video game industry as an ever-changing and fast-evolving medium faces uncertain futures over game budgets, sustainable growth and profits. However, game preservation for the moment remains a firmly backseat issue. Preservation is indeed underway with certain organisations and movements but we may still be some way from preserving game history and specific titles on an industry-wide scale.