The fight for consumers’ right to game preservation has been a recent yet constant uphill battle as the industry fully ditches physical media for a totally digital ecosystem.
Now, buying a game is basically just activating a license that can and will be yanked from your account whenever the company feels like it.
With consoles going obsolete, the means to actually preserve games on those systems are vanishing too. Nintendo’s a prime example, hoarding their massive catalog of classic titles as bait for people to sign up for overpriced monthly subscriptions to stream those same games while actively going after anyone who tries to emulate their games to keep them alive.
Then there’s the whole mess with live-service games, built with an expiration date in mind, tied to “always online” requirements that guarantee they’ll go dark the moment they aren’t profitable enough. Some live-service games, like Sony’s $400 disaster Concord, a “woke” flop, don’t even make it past a week.
Ubisoft’s been especially hostile, outright revoking access to DLC from older games and fully pulling games like The Crew from owners’ UPlay libraries after shutting down their servers.
Consumers have been fighting hard for federal measures to keep games alive, with Ross Scott at the frontlines rallying Europeans to action through his “Stop Killing Games” initiative.
His goal? Mandate that games have offline modes or allow fans to host their own servers once the official ones are taken down, because that’s what this live service cash-grab is really about: squeezing every last cent out of players.
With the shift away from physical copies, game companies save millions on production and shipping, and even as digitalization sweeps consoles like Valve, Sony, and Microsoft, game prices keep climbing. Now, AAA titles clock in at $60 to $70, while live-service games, deliberately designed without offline modes, are built to hook players into prolonged, monetized grind-fests.
They lure players with limited-time rewards, FOMO tactics, and shiny in-game goodies like sexy anime characters, only for those games to go dark once they stop raking in enough cash. Years of investment, money, time, and emotional effort will be flushed down the drain when these games inevitably die.
Imagine the shock, then, when America voted for this planned obsolescence hellscape, where corporations milk every last cent by forcing consumers to replay watered-down classics on subscription services rather than selling these titles outright on modern hardware.
Recently, the US Copyright Office shot down a petition that would’ve let libraries, museums, and archives offer remote digital access to games for research. Their ruling claimed there wasn’t enough clarity on specific exemptions for remote access and argued that keeping these restrictions “protects fair use,” prevents “market harm,” and reduces the “significant risk” that people would access games “for fun” instead of research.
Because of course, video games, at their core, are all about escapism and enjoyment. They’re meant to be recreational, nothing more, nothing less. They’re meant to be recreational, not hoarded for market monopoly or to turn to dust.
The ruling also cited that companies plan to re-release old games on subscription services and that there’s a “substantial market for older games.” While the focus is on old physical game copies, this decision seriously screws over preservationists, fans, and researchers.
Entire online worlds, some of which can only be played online, are lost forever the moment their time is up. All the money spent on games like LawBreakers, Project Spark, Evolve, Gearbox’s Battleborn? Gone, along with any chance of revisiting those worlds for personal satisfaction or for research purposes.
The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) voiced its frustration with the ruling, calling out industry lobbyists and big players like the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) for swaying the Copyright Office to block progress.
The VGHF plans to keep fighting, but honestly, I doubt the U.S. Copyright Office will change its stance, especially when it’s clearly in the lobbyists’ best interests to squeeze as much cash out of consumers as possible. The lack of preservation efforts in the digital age is a goldmine for a select few companies, letting them re-release a select few titles for profit later on, while the vast majority are left to decay as relics of the industry.
This means that no one can properly research or study these games to understand what made them tick, or what made them fail in the first place.
For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) and the Software Preservation Network (SPN) have been pushing a petition to the U.S. Copyright Office, requesting a DMCA takedown exemption to create online libraries and archives for out-of-print games.
This goes well beyond just live-service titles, it includes games from ancient consoles that flopped financially, like the Atari Jaguar, 3DO Interactive, and SEGA CD 32X, to name a few never mind the plethora of arcade only titles that have long since been forgotten.
These digital game libraries and archives would allow researchers and historians to access such games via emulators, which is crucial, especially since 87% of all video game releases in the U.S. before 2010 are now out of print according to their research.
Technology lawyer Kendra Albert pointed out that the Copyright Office didn’t even engage with the supporting evidence seriously. “It’s not fair to video game scholars and preservationists to pretend this is about creating strict exemption rules when the Copyright Office seems to have ignored the evidence that contradicts their prior beliefs,” they stated. “But hey, I guess we tried.”
The sad truth is that copyright holders would rather throw up red tape to block historians and researchers from preserving these creations than risk that access to legacy titles might hurt their monopoly. With this stance from the U.S. Copyright Office, it’s likely that many classic video games will eventually fade into obscurity, or become a hell of a lot harder to access for such purposes in the future.
