In an interview reported by Game Developer, the lawyer Steve Englund, Chief Legal Officer of ESA (Entertainment Software Association) made it clear that, at the moment, i publisher have no intention to support the preservation of games in digital libraries after their support closes.
It is a topic that is becoming pressing in the gaming world, and is also pushing players to take action to support the preservation of games even after the closure of official support, as we have seen recently with the Stop Killing Games initiative, but it seems not there is no interest on the part of publishers in engaging on this front.
At the moment, “There are no possible combinations of limitations among ESA members that would support remote access to these games,” Englund reported, which in legalese should mean the total disinterest of large publishers in the preservation of the games an end in itself.
At the moment, preservation initiatives are very limited
This is obviously not a statement from every single player on the market, but considering that ESA has as members all the major publishers and producers, such as Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, EA and Take Twoto name a few, we can take it as a rather clear declaration of intent.
The idea of a unitary and shared initiative for the digital preservation of video games therefore still seems like an unachievable utopia, at least according to the current positions of individual publishers, but even on the physical front the issue is very complicated.
Englund suggested the possible involvement of large US universities to start a collection project and preservation of games on physical mediaor an integrated cataloging system that could allow them to be traced in some way, but this is a considerable effort, for which resources and personnel are lacking.
Last year, the Video Game History Foundation estimated that 87% of classic video games released in the USA are in “critical danger” with regards to possible “extinction”, or actual total disappearance of the product, but it seems there is not yet a unitary, concrete and effectively functioning project to resolve the problem completely.
