Sony's Reversal of Course Raises Questions About Game Preservation

Sony hit the headlines recently with an announcement that the PSN store for both PlayStation 3 and PS Vita would close its doors forever. The collective gaming community reacted to this news with disappointment, highlighting what they saw as a serious hit to an important part of gaming’s history. So loud were these protests that Sony reversed course, announcing at www.blog.playstation.com/2021/ that they changed their minds and that the stores would remain online into the foreseeable future.

While the idea of closing the store was a strictly business decision, the implications of the move were far broader than Sony seemed to appreciate. In a wider sense, they had crossed a line that could forever affect certain titles, which industry enthusiasts were quick to point out.

Why the Outrage?

The outrage surrounding the move by Sony tied quite simply into the idea of game preservation. In many ways, video games are more than just products, they're collective artistic expressions and cultural artefacts. Understanding this, there is an enormous number of people who work to archive older titles, so we don't forever lose the steps we took on the path to today.

Source: Pixabay

For older systems like the NES, the degradation of game storage media is an inevitability. As the website www.nintendolife.com/news/ explains, there are components in cartridges like electrolytic capacitors which slowly burn out over time. Eventually, this means that every old game cartridge will break, but that’s not the end of these games. Instead, simple rips of this data can be easily performed, with the data easily stored indefinitely, and then emulated on other systems.

On the PS3 and Vita, many games only exist in a digital format. These can't be played or accessed easily any other way, so when the network goes down, a lot of these titles could be lost forever. This move also meant that many of the games people paid real money for would no longer be accessible, with Sony essentially reaching into an account and taking something players had every right to own.

Addressing the Problem

There are two major ways that gaming data like that on the PSN store can be saved, with Sony opting for the easier route of maintaining older forms of access. A much stronger approach, though one which would require much more work and financial investment, would be to port older games to newer systems, and have them hosted there.

Such an approach is not unheard of in interactive entertainment, with online casinos have recently taken a similar approach. For a long time, websites like those on www.bonus.ca/casino-bonus/ have drawn players in through specials like deposit matches and free spins, but these only opened the doors. To keep players involved, services like Jackpot City and King Billy relied on a wide selection of games. Originally, these depended on Macromedia Flash as a platform, but Flash eventually went obsolete. Combatting this meant porting hundreds of older titles to HTML 5, which proved a successful solution.

As it now stands, Sony is essentially turning the problem of today into the problem of tomorrow. As they now exist, the online stores of the PS3 and Vita are on borrowed time, where their death is a matter of when and not if. The only question remaining is if Sony will invest in the permanent solution of updating older games to newer systems, or simply wait it out until a more acceptable time, and then try the same approach again.

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