It’s about time PlayStation put games preservation at the forefront
As the games industry continues to get older, and suddenly hundreds of games are being lost to history, the conversation surrounding games preservation has become more and more prevalent. Plenty of fans and academics are willing to take on the challenge, but copyright laws make it difficult. While Xbox and Nintendo have made strides toward preservation (as minimal as they may be), PlayStation hasn’t much ventured into the discipline — until now. PlayStation dev Garrett Fredley took to Twitter to announce his new job title of Senior Build Engineer, specifically “working as one their initial hires for the newly created Preservation team.”
Today is my first day as a Senior Build Engineer at @PlayStation, working as one of their initial hires for the newly created Preservation team!
Game Preservation was my first career passion, so I’m ecstatic that I get to go back to those roots ????
— Garrett Fredley (@SomeCronzaGuy) April 25, 2022
Over the years, Microsoft has worked hard to make games backward compatible for its newest consoles, and Nintendo is working on releasing more catalogs of its classic games to the public. Sony is finally catching up a bit by at least allowing fans to get access to PS1, PS2, PS3, and PSP games on PS5 with the new PS Plus Premium subscription, but they’re also only doing so after the decision to close the PSP digital store.
I kind of get the vibe that everyone’s trying to find ways to make money off of this, and maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I think that game companies should be devoted to making all of their games accessible to the public, at the very least not making them any more expensive than their equivalent retail price.
Fredley sounds pretty thrilled about the position, stating in the tweet that “games preservation was [his] first career passion.” Good for you, guy! Sony hasn’t announced any other details about the new department, but I am also pretty excited about this development.
Games preservation is becoming more and more crucial by the year as we lose access to old software, or as old hardware is literally deteriorating. Video games are still a relatively young medium, and as we’re quickly approaching the point where huge numbers of titles are no longer playable, so it’s important that companies that creating pipelines in order to prioritize the preservation of their own history.
I’m with Fredley on this one — this stuff is important. Godspeed, my dude.
