Germany's massive 60,000-game preservation project collapses after €1.5 million funding dries up — world's largest game archive was entirely publicly available, now abandoned just as Sony kills physical media

The Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), a German effort to assemble the world's largest publicly accessible video game archive, is being wound down after roughly €1.5 million in public funding expired at the end of April and the federal government declined to renew it. GamesWirtschaft reported on July 3rd that the project's shareholders voted unanimously to shut it down, leaving the future of its database of more than 60,000 cataloged titles unresolved. This decision comes the same week that Sony confirmed it’s ending physical PlayStation disc production.

The ICS held more than 60,000 games spread across cartridge, floppy disk, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, alongside manuals, packaging, and hardware, assembled since 2012 from the USK (Germany's game-ratings authority), the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the industry association Game, and the University of Potsdam. Its public online catalog launched in April 2019 with tens of thousands of entries. The physical holdings remain with the institutions that own them, and whether the shared database and its infrastructure survive is under legal and technical review, according to GamesWirtschaft.

Funding for the ICS came from the Berlin Senate and the federal government's culture commissioner and ran only through late April. Germany's Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), which took responsibility for games policy in 2025, examined a model for permanent institutional funding and concluded it wasn’t economically viable given the scale of the work involved. Berlin economics senator Franziska Giffey had cautioned earlier in the year that support beyond April wasn't guaranteed.

A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network found that 87% of classic games released in the U.S. are out of print and commercially unavailable, a survival rate the researchers put below that of American silent films. In October 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office refused for the fourth time since 2015 to grant a DMCA exemption that would let libraries share preserved games with remote researchers, siding with the Entertainment Software Association.

Meanwhile, fan-run archives face a different set of challenges. Myrient, a repository holding more than 385 TB of preserved games, was set to go offline in early 2026 as AI-driven demand drove up RAM, SSD, and hard-drive prices, before volunteers backed up the collection in full. The ICS shutdown coincides with Sony's confirmation that it will end physical PlayStation disc production in 2028, which will make any future archival attempts all the more difficult.

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