In Three Weeks, Three Doors Closed — Who Preserves Games Now?

This is not a chain reaction. That's what makes it frightening

Let me place a caveat first. These three are not causally linked. The EU's decision did not move Sony; Sony's announcement did not sink the ICS. Different actors, different motives, different countries. They simply happened to fall in the same summer.

And yet — because they are not linked, the same single hole becomes visible. If the three were a chain reaction, stopping the first domino would settle it. Instead, three unrelated institutions withdrew in the same period, each for its own reasons. Which is to say: none of them ever considered game preservation to be its own job. The three events light that void from three separate angles.

Let me open each door one notch.

Door 1: The law called it "not proportionate"

The EU matter began as a citizens' initiative. "Stop Killing Games" — a campaign seeking rules against games that become unplayable after sales end — gathered roughly 1.29 million signatures as a European Citizens' Initiative (ECI). By the rules, the European Commission is obliged to respond formally.

The response on June 16 was a clear "no." Legally requiring that games be kept playable would be "not proportionate," it said, citing intellectual-property rights, confidential business information, and cybersecurity risks once support ends. The alternative it offered was a voluntary industry code of conduct, expected around 2027. A best-effort target with no enforcement behind it.

The campaign has not stood down. Its organizers declared that "the fight goes on" and shifted their legislative venue from the Commission to the European Parliament. Forty-five Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) signed an inquiry calling for legislation, seeking a path to insert preservation requirements as amendments into the Digital Fairness Act now under deliberation.

Worth noting: what the law refused was not "preservation" itself, but compelling businesses to preserve. Asked who should bear the burden, the EU answered only "not the businesses" — and left "then who?" unanswered.

Door 2: The disc, a lifeboat, gets put away

On July 1, Sony announced on the official PlayStation blog that from January 2028 it would end physical-disc production for new PlayStation titles. The reasoning came in numbers. Over the past year, nearly four in five full-game purchases on PS4/PS5 (about 80%) were already digital. Discs of titles released before 2028, it added, will remain available.

You can read this as merely ratifying how people already buy. For many players, the texture of the experience won't change. But from the single vantage of preservation, a disc has one function that is hard to replace: even when the distribution servers go dark, the disc remains, as a physical object, in your hands. Cases keep piling up in which a title — its store closed, its license expired, its download impossible — survived on a single secondhand disc.

That lifeboat, for new titles, stops being built in 2028. The migration from "ownership" to "license" reaches a completion point here. The playability of a work you thought you bought becomes subordinate to the survival of the platform. The last route in which preservation completes on a private bookshelf, without depending on any institution — physical media — quietly narrows.

Door 3: When public money withdraws, sixty thousand titles scatter

The third is the most concrete, and the most material.

Berlin's Computerspielemuseum. The ICS sat within this network of German game-culture preservation. Photo: Assenmacher (Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The ICS was a German project aiming to build one of the world's largest publicly accessible game archives. Spanning cartridge, floppy, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, it collected more than 60,000 titles, plus manuals, packaging, and hardware. Behind it stood names that sustain German game culture: Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur, Berlin's Computerspielemuseum, the USK, and the game-research center (DIGAREC) at the University of Potsdam.

And now the ICS is closing. Roughly €1.5 million in public funding from the Berlin Senate and the German federal government (the Commissioner for Culture and Media) ran out at the end of April 2026, and the proposal to establish it permanently was judged "unviable" by the state's economic authority. According to reporting, on July 3 the shareholders' meeting voted unanimously to end the organization.

The trouble is what comes after. Per Time Extension's reporting, the physical collection "returns to its respective owners." Not transfer — return. The 60,000 titles that had been gathered into one place and opened to the public scatter back to their original owners. The digital archive's destination remains undecided, pending legal and technical review. Assembling it takes labor measured in decades; scattering it takes a single vote. Preservation, this asymmetry reminds us, is first of all "keeping things gathered."

When the official routes close, the burden falls on nameless hands

Each time a door closes, where does the burden go? The answer had already come into focus a little before this summer.

Myrient, a community-run preservation site, holding some 390 TB of game data, announced it would close on March 31, 2026. The reasons were raw. Donations couldn't keep pace with operating costs, and the operator was personally covering around $6,000 a month. What compounded it was a surge in RAM, SSD, and HDD prices driven by AI-datacenter demand. A story about preservation was nearly crushed by an entirely separate force: the supply and demand of semiconductors.

The community moved. "Minerva Archive" — a volunteer-led project launched on February 27, 2026 — distributed the download load across hundreds of people worldwide and reported a 100% backup of Myrient's entire dataset by March 12. It is a deliberate dismantling of the structure that depended on a single server, a single operator, and a single monthly bill, spread out into a distributed one. The No-Intro and Redump collections also remain, redundantly, on the Internet Archive.

This is a story to admire, and at the same time a precarious one. The legal assessment splits by each country's copyright law, and no one can guarantee how long an operation sustained by volunteers' enthusiasm and spare time will last. A gray-zone community is standing in for the role of a "national library." Each time the official route closes, the burden drops from institution to individual, from named body to nameless hands.

Why are books and films different?

Let me place one comparative vantage. In many countries, books have a system of legal deposit: what is published must be lodged, a copy at a time, with a national library or similar. Not someone's goodwill but the law bears preservation. Film, too, has frameworks in which national film archives take responsibility for collection and preservation (I've written elsewhere about the work of Japan's National Film Archive. The survival rate of Japanese films from the 1910s is estimated at 0.2% — even with an institution in place, what is lost is enormous).

Games, in many countries, sit outside this framework. Though they are cultural products no less than books and films, clear examples of games positioned as objects of legal deposit are scarce. Part of the reason is that a game is neither "book" nor "film" but software, and hardware, and a server, and a license — not a single monolith as an object of preservation. The difficulty that you cannot maintain a "playable" state without preserving the runtime environment along with it has, it seems, kept institutions slow to move.

But difficulty is no reason to do without a custodian. If anything, precisely because it is hard, it cannot be dumped on individuals and goodwill. The consensus that books and film arrived at — "preservation is public work" — is one that games alone have not yet reached. This summer's three events exposed that shortfall, in the form of a coincidence.

Which door is closing next?

The PlayStation 5. Disc supply for new titles ends in January 2028. Photo: Ryan Bennett (RyGuy222) (Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Of the three doors, two have already closed. EU legislation is off the table for now. The ICS's 60,000 titles are headed toward scattering. The remaining one, Sony's disc sunset, has only a date reserved — January 2028 — and has not yet shut all the way.

So the right thing is to close with the question left open. Which door is closing next? The candidates are probably more than one: the end of physical media, the shrinking of public funding, surging storage prices, and the suspended question of "whose job is this?"

After the heat of release fades, in whose hands does a game go on living? In the summer of 2026, the answer converged, for now, on "largely unpaid volunteers." That this is not sustainable, the volunteers themselves know best. The responsibility to prepare a sustainable answer remains with the side that closed the doors.

References

• Physical disc production ending in January 2028 — PlayStation.Blog
• Germany's Largest Video Game Preservation Effort To End — Time Extension
• Stop Killing Games says 'the fight goes on' after European Commission rejects proposed rule changes — PC Gamer
• Video Game Preservation Archive Myrient Has Been "100% Backed Up" By The Community — Time Extension
• MiNERVA Archive
• What Does It Mean to Preserve a Film? — The Work of Japan's National Film Archive