Sony is Building a Game Preservation Team

When Sony's expanded PlayStation Plus service starts rolling out next month, it will fold in PlayStation Now, which offers access to hundreds of games from older console generations. Now, it seems the company is getting even more serious about game preservation. From a report: According to Twitter and LinkedIn posts spotted by Video Games Chronicle, Sony has hired at least one engineer (Garrett Fredley, a former build engineer for mobile developer Kabam) to work on a new 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," Fredley wrote. "Let's go and ensure our industry's history isn't forgotten!" [...] Sony historically hasn't done an incredible job with preserving games. Aside from the original PS3 models being able to run many PS1 and PS2 games, backward compatibility seemed like an afterthought until the PS5, which supports all but a few PS4 titles.

leak the code to the mame team!

[Joe_Dragon]

leak the code to the mame team!

Re:leak the code to the mame team!

[OrangeTide]

License old games to individuals as cloud-served ROM / .iso in a bring-your-own-emulator service that supports open source. Companies can let go of the idea that people are going to pirate these old games. Those who are already have pirated them. Everyone else is trying to throw money at IP owners, even after years of neglecting potential customers.

people want to just buy the rom's & not some e

[Joe_Dragon]

people want to just buy the rom's & not some subpar emulator that does not do most of the things that opensource emulator out there right now do.

Kick! Punch! Chop! Block!

[jsepeta]

Kick! Kick! Punch! Punch!
Chop! Kick! Block!

Should be a requirement of copyright

[FeelGood314]

Ignoring the fact that copyright is essentially forever now but there should be a requirement to always release a copyrighted work to the public domain once the copyright expires. For books that is relatively easy but for software that means releasing it in a way that it could be played in emulation on a general purpose computing platform. So no DRM, no server requirement for single player games, a valid working server system of some kind for multiplayer. If a company ever ceases to be able to release a work into the public domain there should be significant fines as well as a loss of copyright on that work. For example, this would mean the BBC should not be able to claim copyright on Dr. Who episodes that it no longer has copies of.

Opportunity to Musk!

[fbobraga]

Cheap to buy man! https://www.theonion.com/pleas... [theonion.com]

Finally

[stikves]

Competition works.

Microsoft, having no new games this gen, pushed really hard for back compat. They even had automated features to boost resolution, frame rates, or even introducing HDR to classic titles. And given neither console had enough new content after 18 months, people realized they could play more of the old. (For the last two quarters Xbox has been leading PS5 in the US).

Sony, being intelligent, now decided to pick this up. They have been notoriously bad with it in the past. They killed PS2 back c