Video game preservation

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Video game preservation, which falls in the broader category of media preservation, is the act of ensuring the accessibility and playability of older video games for the future. There are many reasons why this practice is necessary.

Live-service killing

Live-service games are very difficult to preserve due to their reliance on the parent company's will to keep the service online. However, in some cases communities create private servers in order to make the game completely playable.

Rarely some companies adapt the game to be completely playable offline with all the available features that used to exist when the game was a live-service.

Death of a technology

For example, when Flash stopped being supported in browsers, many people made effort in preserving flash video games by porting them to html5. Flash emulators like Ruffle allow to run flash games and content on web browsers. Flashpoint Archive is a community project dedicated to preserve content that runs on Flash. It counts with downloadable applications that allow to download and run Flash content from the device.

Few numbers of physical copies

Some video games only exist in physical copies and these copies are in a limited quantity. Also the amount of copies could be reduced because of the possibility a phisical copy could deteriorate over time. Digitalization makes easier to copy, adapt and create backups of the original video game, making it more available to public as well.

Further reading

• Stop Killing Games
• Storefront shutdown
• GOG.com