There Won’t Be Easier Access to Retro Games, as It Would Destroy Their Sales Market

30 Nov There Won’t Be Easier Access to Retro Games, as It Would Destroy Their Sales Market

The Video Game History Foundation has lost a battle with lobbying groups that aimed to make accessing older games easier. The foundation’s goal was to create virtual libraries for hard-to-find or unavailable titles.

In the summer of 2023, the Video Game History Foundation released a report showing that up to 87% of games released before 2010 were unavailable. The foundation wanted to change this by advocating for an exception to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to allow game libraries to lend out their own games. Unfortunately, the case was denied by the United States Copyright Office (see Gizmodo).

Rare Retro Games Will Remain Inaccessible to Most. The Video Game History Foundation wanted to make it easier to access many games that are impossible to purchase today. The foundation aimed to enable a game to be loaned out from a library or archive to more than one person at a time. Currently, one copy of a game can only be loaned out to someone who appears in person at the location.

Opponents argued that these game libraries and archives do not have adequate safeguards to protect against piracy. They also stated that there is a thriving retro game market today, and a free library would destroy it. Unfortunately, this market primarily exists for collectors willing to spend large sums of money on retro games. People who simply want to play a specific title have limited access to older games.

The Video Game History Foundation has announced that this isn’t the end of the fight, and they may eventually gain more support from government organizations. In California, stores will now have to display information that they only offer a license for a specific game. Valve has followed these recommendations, adding a note about this. The fight to preserve video games is not only happening in the United States.

Since July of this year, signatures have been collected for the European campaign “Stop the Destruction of Video Games.” Despite early success, the initiative has lost momentum and risks stalling. One more country needs to meet the required signature threshold, and overall, the petition needs more than 600,000 signatures from European Union countries. However, the campaign led by Ross Scott and the efforts of the Video Game History Foundation show that awareness of the need to preserve access to older games is growing.