The report of a Survey of the Video Game Reissue Market in the United States (conducted for the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network, in collaboration with the University of Washington Information School GAME Research Group) by Phil Salvador comments
Video games are part of our cultural history. The video game industry and cultural heritage institutions agree that video games should be preserved for both entertainment and study. As part of that effort, a growing market has emerged for reissuing historical games, popularly called retro games or classic games.
Despite this, the availability of historical games is generally understood to be limited. This is due to a variety of factors, including technical constraints, complicated rights issues, rightsholder disinterest, and the long-term volatility of digital distribution platforms. The scale of this problem is troubling for anyone hoping to access games, but it is particularly critical for the cultural heritage field, which depends on the ability to access historical video games for research and must otherwise rely on unauthorized means to access them.
Although the game industry agrees with the cultural heritage field that preservation is important, they disagree about how severe this problem is and how to address it. Industry lobbyists in the United States have opposed new copyright exemptions for game preservation on the grounds that there is already a thriving reissue market. While a healthy market for certain game reissues does exist, it is overshadowed by the volume of games that remain unavailable.
To better inform discussions of these complex issues, we gathered empirical evidence about the state of the video game reissue market in the United States and what portion of historical games are actually still in commercial distribution. We believe this is the first major study to analyze the availability rates for a broad sample of historical games in this manner.
What We Studied
This study analyzed a dataset representing over 4,000 historical video games released in the United States before 2010 to determine whether they have been reissued or are otherwise still available through their rightsholders. The survey examined four sample groups, each representing a different segment of the diverse population of video games:
● A sample of all historical games released before 2010.
● Games for the Commodore 64, a platform that represents an abandoned ecosystem with the lowest level of commercial interest.
● Games for the Game Boy platform family, a neglected ecosystem with demonstrable commercial interest but declining availability.
● Games for the PlayStation 2, an active ecosystem with high recommercialization activity from multiple parties.
Historical video game availability is dire. Only 13 percent of classic video games published in the United States are currently in release. This figure is comparable to the commercial availability of pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less) or the survival rate of American silent-era films (14 percent), two other mediums at risk.
These levels are consistent across platform ecosystems and time periods. All three platform libraries examined for this study have poor reissue rates, regardless of commercial interest (see table 1). Despite vastly different levels of platform-owner activity, the Commodore 64 and the Game Boy family ecosystems are both effectively abandoned, while our example of a commercially active ecosystem, the PlayStation 2 ecosystem, only reaches a reissue rate of 12 percent. Across all platforms, no five-year period from 1960–2009 rises above 20 percent availability (see figure 1).
Historically significant games with low commercial value are especially unlikely to be reissued. The reissue rate falls below 3 percent for all games released prior 1985, a period with high historical importance to the early game industry but minimal commercial activity. The Commodore 64—an important platform for the 1980s computer game industry—showed both the lowest availability rate and the lowest diversity of reissue sources out of any ecosystem we examined. This is evidence that the interests of the marketplace do not align with the needs of video game researchers. Digital marketplace volatility threatens the availability of game reissues. While games do get reissued, the long-term instability of digital game distribution platforms means they often lapse out of release, especially in ecosystems where there is a low diversity of reissue sources. 6.5 percent of the Game Boy library was previously available only through Nintendo’s Virtual Console storefronts for the Wii U and 3DS platforms, but since those services shuttered in March 2023, those games are no longer available in any form. Other legacy digital stores that are still running, such as the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita stores, have experienced such a degradation in service quality that users are effectively unable to purchase titles that are technically still in commerce.
Takeaways
This is a systemic problem. Historical game availability issues are widespread across all platform ecosystems and time periods. No single company or platform owner is responsible for this reality. This is a crisis for the entire medium of video games.
While the reissue market is active, it’s not enough. Publishers do reissue historical video games through a variety of formats, services, and products, but their collective effort has amounted to recommercializing or otherwise making available less than one- fifth of all historical games. As a result, nearly 90 percent of the game industry’s historical output is inaccessible without acquiring vintage games and hardware from the expensive second-hand market, visiting library collections in person due to restrictions imposed by Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or resorting to piracy.
The game industry must acknowledge this problem—and that libraries and archives can help solve it. While it may seem hard to reconcile the interests of the commercial marketplace with the needs of researchers, the first step is to agree on the facts and recognize the significant gaps that exist in the reissue market. Cultural heritage institutions can help close that gap by providing access to the overwhelming majority of games that remain unavailable.
