In July 2023, a non-profit put a number on something retro players had long suspected but never been able to prove. According to the Video Game History Foundation, only 13 percent of classic games released in the United States were still in print. The other 87 percent were out of print, or "critically endangered," as VGC reported the foundation putting it.
It's an awkward number for an industry that sells a lot of nostalgia. As the foundation's own guide points out, you can fire up a Switch and get Super Mario Bros. and Pac-Man, or buy Final Fantasy VII for just about every platform, which makes it look as though old games are well looked after. The study set out to check whether that impression held up across the whole of game history, not just the hits.
Why anyone needed to count
The VGHF says the study was meant to settle the facts for a policy debate. As the foundation explains in its own guide to the research, libraries, museums and archives in the US had been asking the Copyright Office since 2015 for exemptions that would make it easier to preserve games and make them available to researchers. Each time, game industry lobbyists opposed them, arguing there was already an active, growing market for classic games that libraries would interfere with.
That claim was hard to argue with, because nobody had the numbers. So the VGHF and the Software Preservation Network decided to get some. "It's not enough just to have a hunch," the foundation wrote. "We need hard data."
How you count 'every old game'
The method was more careful than the headline suggests. The researchers defined a classic game as anything released before 2010, roughly when digital distribution took off, and pulled a random list of 1,500 of them from MobyGames, which the foundation describes as a huge community-run database of video games. They then asked one question of each: can an ordinary person buy a version of this today?
They gave publishers generous credit. A remaster or enhanced edition counted, as long as it wasn't "substantially different" from the original, and even announced re-releases counted. A ground-up remake didn't: the original 2005 Yakuza was marked unavailable, because Yakuza Kiwami is a separate game. Expensive collector's editions, raw source code and games only sold for defunct hardware didn't count either.
They also zoomed in on three platform "ecosystems": the Commodore 64 as an "abandoned" one, the PlayStation 2 as an "active" one, "where games for these platforms are being re-released all the time," and the whole Game Boy family, from the original through the Game Boy Advance, as a "neglected" one, "where there's a lot of commercial interest but still not many games in print." All told, the study looked at more than 4,000 games. Volunteers from the VGHF community and the University of Washington Information School spent nearly four months checking them, with data accurate to April 15, 2023.
The results
The answer was 13 percent in print, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent. And it was low everywhere. According to the VGHF, no five-year period in the study rose above 20 percent availability, and fewer than 3 percent of games released before 1985 were still in print.
The platforms told the same story. The Commodore 64 came in at 4.5 percent, and the VGHF found most of those available C64 games relied on a single service, Antstream Arcade. Without it, the foundation calculated, C64 availability would drop to 0.75 percent. Even the PlayStation 2, the study's example of an active ecosystem, reached only 12 percent.
The Game Boy result showed how quickly things can go backwards. As of April 2023, only 5.87 percent of Game Boy games were in print. Another 6.5 percent had been, until Nintendo shut down the 3DS and Wii U eShops in March 2023. VGHF estimated that around 1,000 unique games fell out of release when those stores closed. VGC, reporting on the study at the time, singled out the same Game Boy and Commodore 64 figures.
For context, the foundation compared its numbers to other media: slightly better than pre-World War II audio recordings, at 10 percent or less, and slightly worse than the survival rate of American silent films, at 14 percent. Games from the 1980s, '90s and 2000s, in other words, were faring about as well as films from the silent era.
"I hope this study wakes people up," VGHF co-director Frank Cifaldi said, as quoted by VGC. "The results are worse than probably any other medium."
The copyright fight
The study was aimed at the next round of DMCA rulemaking, scheduled for 2024. The Software Preservation Network, backed by the VGHF, petitioned for an exemption that would let libraries and archives give researchers remote access to out-of-print games. As things stood, PC Gamer explained, the anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA stopped them breaking copy protection to do that.
It didn't work. In October 2024, PC Gamer reported, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter ruled that supporters "have not satisfied their burden to demonstrate that the requested uses are or are likely to be noninfringing." The Entertainment Software Association had opposed the change, arguing, in PC Gamer's account, that "there remains a substantial market for classic games." The VGHF said it was "disappointed" and that the industry's position "forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods to access the vast majority of out-of-print video games."
The ruling wasn't a total dead end. PC Gamer noted that DMCA exemptions are reviewed every three years, and the Copyright Office recommended clarifying the existing single-copy restriction.
Where it stands now
The argument hasn't gone away. In July 2026, Time Extension reported that the VGHF was again calling on the ESA to offer "meaningful solutions" for preserving digital-only games, after PlayStation announced, according to Time Extension's report, that it would stop producing disc versions of its games by 2028 and close the PS3 and PS Vita digital storefronts in 2027. "Asking museums to download a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI and hope it'll run in 50 years is not a preservation solution," Cifaldi said in the statement.
Ollie's take: What makes this study stick is that it's boringly rigorous. It doesn't rely on nostalgia or outrage, just 1,500 random games and a yes-or-no question. The uncomfortable bit is that the number can get worse without anyone deciding it should: two stores close, and around a thousand games quietly drop off the list.
Reporting notes