Year: 2023

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.