A classic game can be famous, influential, and still be almost impossible to play legally. That contradiction sits at the centre of video game preservation. Games may feel permanent when they appear in digital shops or subscription catalogs, but access can vanish with a licensing change, a closed storefront, unsupported hardware, or a server going dark.
The scale is larger than a handful of obscure releases. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network found that 87% of classic games released in the United States were out of print. Its sample covered 1,500 games, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5%, and treated pre-2010 releases as classic games for the study.
That leaves only 13% represented in the current commercial market. Put plainly: buying old games cannot preserve the medium when almost nine out of ten are no longer being sold.
Availability is not preservation
A re-release is useful. It gives players a legal route to an older game, often without the trouble of finding original hardware. It can also fund restoration work and bring a forgotten title to a new audience. But a shop listing is a sales arrangement, not an archive.
The distinction matters because commercial availability follows demand. Publishers have good reasons to bring back recognizable games with strong audiences. The same calculation works against regional oddities, licensed games, educational software, unsuccessful experiments, annual sports releases, and ordinary games that never acquired a cult following.
Those ordinary games count. History built only from enduring hits gives us a distorted picture of how people actually played, what developers attempted, and how genres changed. Failed ideas can explain as much as successful ones. A licensed game can reveal how a studio handled severe time and budget constraints. A forgotten handheld release can show design choices shaped by a tiny screen, a battery, or a particular audience.
Preservation asks whether future players and researchers can examine the work. Commercial availability asks whether selling it now makes business sense. Sometimes the answers overlap. Often they do not.
The numbers get worse when you look closer
The foundation's study did more than produce one headline figure. Researchers drew a random list from MobyGames, then examined several ecosystems in more detail. Across more than 4,000 games checked, no five-year period in the study exceeded 20% availability.
The platform results cut through the comforting idea that popular hardware will take care of itself. The Commodore 64 had an availability rate of 4.5%. The PlayStation 2, which the study treated as an active ecosystem with substantial reissue interest, reached only 12%. The Game Boy family came in at 5.87% after the closure of the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U eShops.
That closure is a clean example of digital fragility. According to the study, an estimated 1,000 unique games fell out of release when those stores closed. The files did not suddenly stop existing, but an authorized path to acquire them did.
The market can also create a single point of failure. At the time of the research, most commercially available Commodore 64 games depended on one service, Antstream Arcade. The report estimated that availability would have fallen to 0.75% if that service disappeared. A catalog can look healthy while balancing on one contract and one company.
A remake does not replace its source
Modern remakes create another preservation blind spot. A remake may be easier to buy and better suited to current hardware, but it is a new interpretation. Changes to movement, camera, combat, art, sound, pacing, localization, or interface can alter the work substantially.
The study used the original 2005 Yakuza and Yakuza Kiwami to draw this line. Kiwami is faithful, but it was rebuilt from the ground up, so researchers counted the original as out of print. That is the right call. Treating the remake as a substitute would be like preserving a new film adaptation and discarding the earlier one.
Remasters are messier. Some preserve most of the underlying work while changing presentation or controls. Others replace assets, remove licensed music, alter effects, or introduce bugs. There is no universal rule that settles every case, which is precisely why access to original versions matters. Without the source release, comparison becomes guesswork.
Games are unusually difficult cultural objects
A book needs legible pages. A film needs a playable copy and compatible projection or decoding equipment. Games carry those needs plus software dependencies, input devices, operating systems, online services, account systems, and sometimes external databases.
Saving the program is necessary, but it may not be sufficient. An archive may also need manuals, patches, downloadable content, server code, controller documentation, and records of how people played together. For an online world, screenshots and video preserve appearances. They do not preserve the rules, social behaviour, or feeling of inhabiting it.
Even a complete copy can be trapped behind law and access restrictions. Libraries and archives in the United States can preserve games digitally under certain conditions, but broad remote access remains restricted. In 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office declined a proposed exemption that would have allowed eligible institutions to give researchers remote access to out-of-print games. In practice, preservation and meaningful access remain separate problems.
That gap is hard to defend in a medium born digital. Requiring a researcher to travel to a particular building to study software is expensive and excludes people who lack funding, time, mobility, or the right passport. A preserved game nobody can reasonably examine is safer than a lost game, but it is not fully available as history.
Preservation includes everything around the game
The playable object gets most of the attention, yet development and reception records are just as fragile. Source materials explain why a game took the shape it did. Contemporary magazines show how it was marketed, reviewed, and discussed before later consensus hardened around it.
This is where archival work can make visible progress even while access to game software remains constrained. The Video Game History Foundation opened its digital library in early access in January 2025. At launch, it included more than 1,500 searchable, out-of-print magazines, development documents, promotional materials, and over 100 hours of production footage from the Myst series.
These are not decorative extras. A design document can reveal a discarded mechanic. A press kit can show which audience a publisher imagined. A trade magazine can capture labour disputes, sales anxieties, or technical arguments that disappear from polished anniversary retrospectives.
The archive is free to search online, but it does not offer playable retail games. Its own FAQ points to current U.S. copyright restrictions as the reason it cannot share digital access to out-of-print games with researchers. The result is revealing: we can increasingly search the paper trail around a game while the game itself remains inaccessible.
Players are part of the preservation record
Institutions preserve collections, but players preserve context. Old forum posts, fan sites, strategy notes, mod archives, recorded matches, speedruns, oral histories, and personal accounts show what a game meant in use. Official materials rarely capture that.
Personal records matter too. A five-star rating says little by itself. A short note about where you played, who was there, or why you stopped can preserve the part no publisher owns: your experience of the game.
Perthro is not a software archive, and a journal entry cannot keep a discontinued game running. It can preserve your side of the record. Perthro lets you track games you have played or shelved, rate them on a five-star scale, write reviews of any length, and make custom lists. You can also follow friends, see activity, react, and reply. Those features are useful here because game history is partly a history of recommendations, disagreements, shared sessions, and changing taste.
If you want to document your own play without turning it into an assignment, keep the entry small and specific:
- Record the version and platform you actually played.
- Note anything that may disappear, such as an online mode, licensed soundtrack, seasonal event, or community server.
- Write one concrete memory rather than a plot summary.
- Mention who recommended it or played with you.
- Update the entry if a later port or remake changes your view.
That record will not solve preservation policy. It will give future you, and perhaps your friends, better evidence than a purchase receipt or achievement timestamp.
What better preservation would look like
No single group can carry this alone. Publishers control source code, rights, builds, and server infrastructure. Libraries understand durable storage, cataloging, and public access. Museums provide interpretation. Researchers establish context. Fans recover neglected material and often notice losses first.
A healthier system would make preservation planning part of a game's life rather than an emergency after delisting. Studios could maintain clean archival builds and documentation. Contracts could address long-term access to licensed assets. Online games could have end-of-service plans that preserve some playable form where technically and legally possible. Rights holders could work with qualified archives before old hardware, source files, and staff knowledge disappear.
The danger is selective memory
The preservation crisis is easy to miss because the best-known games keep returning. A famous mascot appears on each new console, a beloved role-playing game gets another remaster, and the past seems close at hand. Meanwhile, thousands of less marketable games vanish from ordinary access.
That produces a tidy history built from winners. It leaves out the local releases, bad sequels, strange experiments, short-lived online worlds, and merely decent games that filled most people's shelves. It also leaves out the personal layer: the rented copy played over one weekend, the multiplayer game that held a friendship together, the game abandoned for reasons a completion statistic could never explain.
Game preservation means keeping the software, the surrounding evidence, and the human memory in conversation. The store can help with the first part for as long as a listing remains profitable. It was never designed to do the whole job.
Perthro is free on the App Store for iPhone and requires iOS 17.0 or later. For help, visit /support, or continue the conversation with other players at /community.