ESA expects publishers to fix preservation problem
The video game industry's efforts to preserve its surprisingly fragile history took a turn this week when the Video Game History Foundation shared data indicating that 87 percent of games released before 2010 have not been preserved in any real capacity. The Foundation has long faced an uphill struggle against the United States Copyright Office, a subdivision of the Library of Congress, which has yet to greenlight broad protection exemptions for game preservation.
Such exemptions have faced resistance by the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group backed by major publishers like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony. And even after this week's alarm bell, the ESA is still convinced that said publishers and their affiliates are the ones best equipped to preserve video game history.
Speaking to Game Developer in a conversation about the ESA's just-released "Essential Facts" survey for 2023, ESA president & CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis described video games as "the most expressive works in our copyright canon," and that it is "critically important" that companies maintain authority to best decide how video games are-released.
"I don't know that I agree with the results of [the VGHF's] study or how they're characterizing it," he said. "There's a robust avenue for preservation to occur and that is occurring."
As positive examples, Pierre-Louis pointed to recent efforts by Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony to crack open their back catalogues. Microsoft spent a number of years making Xbox and Xbox 360 games backwards compatible on modern Xbox devices, while Nintendo, and Sony each released retro emulation hardware pre-packaged with titles that ran on the original consoles.
Nintendo has also spent the last few years making some older games
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