There is No Game Preservation, Only Digital Distribution
On Monday, rumors began to swirl that Sony would close the digital marketplaces for the PS3, PS Vita, and PSP. This came as a shock to gamers on Twitter and Reddit, drawing grave concern to the plight of video game preservation, and inspiring a lot of discussion. This can’t happen! These games should be around forever, worried players online say, and should be available for mass consumption in perpetuity. Gamers inherently know that there is no collective video game preservation strategy; that all we have is temporary digital distribution, tied to owning one particular device at one particular point in time. We can buy a game, but only right now, and right now is all there is.
A company shouldn’t be able to just take away a player’s right to access games, the saying goes, especially if they’re purchasing them legally. I agree — in an ideal world, every game would be publicly available for purchase in an easy, functional way in perpetuity. But this isn’t an ideal world, and video game developers and publishers conform to rules outside logic.
A lot of people brought up software emulation as a way to preserve these games — as I’ve written about in the past, it isn’t perfect. Looking to emulators and their developers is a fool’s errand — proverbial string and duct tape holding it together. Emulation is limited by having to legally navigate the definition of software piracy, as well as a lack of an economy underpinning its development. Most of them are just done for fun or via individual donations if they’re lucky. Because of intellectual property and lack of communication with the game developers themselves, they also don’t have access to the digital assets that would ensure proper and accurate emulation. Even the legal methods of emulation — Sony selling PS2 games on PS4, or games like Super Mario 3D All-Stars — aren’t perfect. Emulation as a digital preservation strategy is a non-starter, at least for now.
I think events like Sony announcing the closure of the seventh generation digital marketplaces frighten and worry gamers at least in part because they reveal the inexorable passage of time. How many memes or articles have you seen online that are shocked that the writers are getting old, and so are the games of their childhood? Halo is 20 years old, dude, and that’s crazy when you think about it.
I sympathize, but I can only put up with this discourse for so long. Your youth slipping away and fading into nostalgia is just one of those things you have to accept and try to deal with. It truly has been 20 years since 2001, and the sooner you wrestle with that fact, the better. I have to wonder if the 360/PS3/Wii era growing old hits differently as it was also the first one that was well and truly online. Xbox Live was always there, it was the birth of the PlayStation Network, and even the Wii attempted a modern online gaming interface. At the same time, the internet as we know it came into being while we played these games.
The emotional toll in seeing our lives pass before our eyes is one thing. But video games aren’t envisioned as ephemeral art installations, here for a short time and gone the next. They’re spoken of as holy relics designed for museum shelves, and as items to be studied by future generations. I’ll be able to play my favorite childhood games with my kids! Video games are seen as the revolutionary new frontier for interactivity, like television and movies before them. Not a flash in the pan artwork.
The more shocking element of digital marketplaces being shut down is that it shows how much of our gaming habits are directly tied to the unknowable whims of multinational corporations, a point I’m much more inclined to engage with. I’ll always be able to play Halo online with my buddies…right?
This type of thing is cyclical. Every couple of years, something like this happens, especially as older online services and digital distribution networks are turned off. A service people have forgotten about gets shut down due to lack of interest, and a melodramatic section of internet culture mourns. The reaction is always the same — shock, astonishment at how old they were, and grief that they’ll never be able to play their games again.
In early 2010, Microsoft shut down Xbox Live for the original Xbox. It had ceased production five years earlier and hadn’t received a new game in a year and a half. At that point, it was far from a hot commodity. It would have been silly not to expect a final sunsetting of the original Xbox. Yet it seemed to have come as a surprise. A handful of gamers hoped against hope and still kept their consoles on, connected to the internet, for as long as that worked. One player kept his copy of Halo 2 open and online for almost a month after Microsoft pulled the plug, until he was forcibly booted from the game. Get owned, noob.
In early 2019, the original Wii Shop Channel closed for a console that came out in 2006 and hadn’t been produced since 2013. That marked a “death of a piece of Nintendo magic.” Ironically, at the time, the gamers that proudly identified as such largely didn’t care for the Wii — its reputation in the late 2000’s for only putting out “casual” games was widespread, much to Nintendo’s dismay. People may have nostalgic admiration for it, and especially its slapper of a theme song, but can you honestly tell me when the last time you bought something on the Wii Shop Channel was? I bought a ton of DLC for the Rock Band games on the Wii, but that was still only around 2008 or 2009. The Wii Shop Channel persisted for another decade, clinging for life on the Wii U, an unambiguous flop of a console. The idea that Nintendo kept it afloat until 2019, with all the storage and bandwidth costs associated with a digital marketplace, is astonishing.
This is the point I keep coming back to when it comes to Sony sunsetting their digital marketplaces. The PS3 came out in 2006 and, if rumors are true and the PS3 digital store closes, will have sold copies of its games for 15 years. That’s an insanely long time for a single console to be actively selling games. It’s quite literally like if I walked into a Wal-Mart in 2006 and found a brand-new SNES game sitting on the shelf. The shocker isn’t that the PS3/PSP/Vita stores are being shuttered, it’s that they’re even open in 2021.
The PS3 and PSP were great sellers, true. But at what point does it become unrealistic to expect billion-dollar video game companies to keep up services for consoles that are no longer in production? The Vita was a flop, too — one of the floppiest. Why on earth would Sony keep this up and running? They get way more money and way more value out of people buying deluxe editions of their current games rather than a handful of retro weirdos buying a ROM of Brave Fencer Musashi. Ironically enough, these companies also get a lot more money out of remastering and repackaging older titles, and marketing those to modern gamers based on nostalgia. Doesn’t playing a remaster sound like fun? Who needs that old stuff?
The realm of cranks and weirdos is populated by those who want video games preserved online and readily available. We know this is true because there’s data on this. Ars Technica published a study in 2017 that showed that older games that are backwards compatible games with the Xbox One only make up a marginal percentage (about 1.5%) of all Xbox One activity. It’s quite literally the last thing Xbox One users use their consoles for. But coding backwards compatibility and ensuring that hundreds of games run acceptably on your machine takes time and money, and the second that it becomes too cost-prohibitive to ensure backwards compatibility, it will be taken away as well.
But for now, it’s a great business tactic. Microsoft has this stuff figured out — backwards compatibility for older games is a great option to have and lets you posture that you have a leg up on your competition. It might not sell many systems, but it’s a point on the board. It’s crucial to realize that they’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, though. It’s certainly not a digital preservation strategy, either. It’s yet more digital distribution, and it always has been.
Sony’s just more a little more straightforwardly slimy about this sort of thing. In 2017, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan controversially asked “Why would anybody play [older titles]?” PS1 games look bad and aren’t as polished as the new stuff.
But that marginal market of cranks and weirdos is out there for now. So they’ll port some old titles to the PS4 and keep them around, as long as people keep buying them. Bandwidth and storage are expensive, though. And once people stop the money flow, those titles will go away. This is a fact. In due time, obsolescence will come for the PS4, the PS4 Pro, and yes, even the PS5. In 2027 or so, I can update this article about the PS4’s digital marketplace being closed, too.
Time for the PS3, PSP, and PS Vita has just run out. That’s all.
