RPCS3 can now play 75% of the tracked PS3 library on PC, reaching its milestone as Sony prepares to close the console’s digital store and abandon new physical releases.
Along with the many displays of outrage, gnashing of teeth and other displays of profound grief at the recent news that Sony will no longer manufacture physical game discs come 2028, we have also heard some voices pipe up with a variety of statements, such as that this decision makes game archiving basically impossible. Of course, the truth of the matter is that software archiving in general has become much harder already over the past decades, while game consoles are just late to the archiving-hostile party.
As an example, one merely has to contrast Sony’s PlayStation with e.g. the Valve Steam store and software by juggernauts like Adobe and Autodesk. Here the former moved after the Creative Suite (CS6) series of Photoshop and other tools fully over to the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription model, where DRM and constant rental software renewals are in order. Unlike that disc copy of CS6 Master Collection that will stay good practically forever, there’s nothing really to archive with Adobe’s CC software.
Similarly, with digital game downloads and their constant patches now put inside a heavily encrypted environment that relies on a special launcher, preserving video games has been turned into into a virtual nightmare for many years now.
Why Archive
Archiving is about accumulating historical records or materials. The scope and reason for a particular archive can differ, such as a company’s archive with financial records, an engineering department’s archive of technical references, or a museum’s archive of physical artefacts. Whatever the reason, the same goal applies: the maintaining or creating of a historical timeline that can be later referenced as needed.
An essential part of archives is to act as a primary reference source: where possible archives contain only the original documents and artefacts, making them as close to an objective source of history as possible. This is both extremely useful for a company when the tax office does a surprise inspection, but it is also for anyone who wishes to do any kind of historical research. This includes research into the development of a certain kind of software over the centuries and all types of related hardware.
Within the world of software archiving not much changes about this primary mission, except for the digital aspect that earns it the title of digital preservation. At least until fairly recently this meant mostly making copies of physical storage media and any associated physical media like documentation and manuals, but increasingly the subject of such preservation and archiving entails digital data that never was bound to or accompanied by any kind of physical media.
Such digital preservation is a big part of organizations like the Internet Archive, whose archives contain copies of software and games that might otherwise have been lost to the ages. The cases of retro enthusiasts coming across a floppy disk or CD containing some obscure game or set of drivers and uploading a copy to the Internet Archive are both numerous and an excellent example of digital preservation.
Other archives like the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) have a more narrow focus, as their name implies. Their basic mission is no different, of course, with creating an archive that preserves history. Here the best part about digital preservation is that it makes it possible to create virtually infinite bit-perfect copies of the materials, making it incredibly easy to share and enjoy multimedia, gaming, and other content from these archives.
Of course, if that was all that there is to be said about digital archiving and preservation then this is basically where we could conclude merrily that all is well, and that whether software is distributed digitally or on some kind of physical storage media is of no concern. In this scenario said software can be copied around to one’s heart’s content, burned to optical media and so on without restrictions, ensuring its preservation.
With distributors of software having had fits about how easy it is to copy and distribute said software since at least the 1980s, it’s little wonder that they haven’t seen fit to rely on the fact that copyright infringement is illegal, and instead sought to make it impossible to copy the data of software. This led to a wide variety of copy restriction implementations, including on floppy disks, such as Electronic Arts’ Interlock system, while Nintendo’s game cartridges mostly relied on this more obscure format to keep people from creating their own cartridges.
In the face of these hurdles, the US Library of Congress notes that, for some software, it’s not enough to have the software on some medium, but also the console or hardware to play it on.
These copy restriction mechanisms are a form of digital restrictions management (DRM), euphemistically called ‘rights management’, since DRM only removes rights. As software became decoupled from physical media by the late 90s along with multimedia content like MP3 music, alternate DRM schemes were developed that restrict copying, generally through encryption and a convoluted decryption scheme that even includes hardware-level encryption such as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).
The upshot of all these copy restriction schemes is that you have to jump through many hoops to still create a copy, whether it involves breaking a floppy copying scheme, using an HDMI splitter that accidentally forgets to re-apply HDCP before sending the content off to a capture card, catching a lucky break with a leaky DVD CSS implementation, or using the analog hole to create that ‘good enough’ copy.
Nobody buys games on DVDs anymore, however. When a digital game is provided via an online store service, how can this be preserved in a digital archive? Since all of these rely on an internet-dependent DRM scheme which fails the moment there’s an issue anywhere in the chain, or if said authentication servers are turned off in N years from now, all preservation schemes here are by definition flawed or at least legally awkward.
A Digital Void
When EA created its Interlock copy restriction scheme it was likely not concerned with whether or not copies of their games would survive into the 2020s, never mind whether anyone would still be using FDDs. It does however indicate the central problem here, one that goes far beyond a black-and-white physical media vs digital-only show-off. Especially since physical media could be argued to be flawed enough that it deserved it to die.
In today’s inevitable march towards a future in which we’re all consuming content using ‘our’ Smart Terminal Devices that rely on any number of paid subscriptions to gain access to the actual content stored on the servers of our benevolent Content Overlords, what probably rankles people the most about the PlayStation physical media announcement is less the demise of physical media and more a reminder of how much has already been taken from us.
In a statement made by VGHF director Frank Cifaldi on the end of physical PlayStation discs – and the concurrent announcement of the shutdown of the PlayStation 3 and Vita online stores – this is put in the broader context of the digital void that we’re facing, in which a large part of video game history simply cannot be legally preserved.
The Legal Conundrum
Here we have to address the rather sizeable elephant in the room, in the form of copyright infringement. Here we see large groups of very nice people in friendly online communities who carefully strip any offending DRM that may even prevent the game from working, while ensuring that the freely provided bundle is kept up to date with only the best patches and anything of relevance.
Within these communities you can find entire swathes of video game history preserved for the enjoyment of connoisseurs, including tutorials, manuals, carefully curated collections mods and extensions, plus everything else that would make a professional digital archivist salivate.
But these ‘shadow archives’ are definitely illegal according to copyright law, ergo the only option available to VGHF and other organizations that are trying to stay on the light side of the law might be to wait a few decades, see which games enter the legal grey zone of ‘abandonware‘ and see whether they’ll still get hit by DMCA takedown request in 2050 for a game that ceased being offered for sale in 2026.
In the early 1990s, Don’t Copy That Floppy was an anti-piracy campaign that attempted to connect with computer-savvy youth through the power of hip-hop. While somewhat difficult to imagine given our current draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM) hellscape, warning kids about the potential legal ramifications of duplicating floppy disks containing copyrighted software was seen as necessary since at the time there was usually nothing preventing users from simply copying the contents of one disk to another.
Unfortunately 30+ years down the road, we’re now finding that somebody really should have been backing up some of those disks. Which is why the University of Cambridge of launched the Future Nostalgia project and produced Copy That Floppy! — a phenomenal guide on preserving the contents of floppy disks while we still can.
Visualizing a disk’s flux stream can identify debris and damage.
There’s no telling how much data could potentially be lost to time because its stuck on such an antiquated and fragile storage media, and the situation only gets worse with the passage of time. The problem isn’t just that modern computers don’t have floppy drives. The disks themselves degrade with age, a process which is accelerated if they aren’t stored properly.
As such, Copy That Floppy! only briefly touches on the most ideal situation — that is, buying a USB floppy drive and making copies of the bog standard 3.5 inch disks you might come across. It then moves right on into more advanced topics, such as interfacing with less common drive types, how to safely clean floppies, and the use of advanced tools such as Greaseweazle to analyze captured disk images.
Sony announced on Wednesday morning that it plans to phase out physical media for future PlayStation games, which is a massive market disruption for an already reeling games industry. It ends trade-ins and lending, raises the overall price of entry for the PlayStation ecosystem, and turns your shelf full of games into licenses that can potentially disappear.
The news came via a post on the official PlayStation blog by senior communications director Sid Shuman. As of January 2028, all games for PlayStation platforms will only be available in digital formats, such as direct downloads.
“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” Shuman writes. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
Analysts have expected an announcement like this for some time. As per Circana senior director Mat Piscatella, physical media sales in gaming have been on a steady downward turn since their peak in 2009, hitting an all-time low in 2025. In fact, several companies have sprung up since then that treat physical games as an exclusive collectible, such as Limited Run, Lost in Cult, and Videogames New York.
US new physical video game software spending. 12 months ending May 2007-2026:
It’s not hard to see why Sony would make this move. We’re approaching the point that would usually mark the end of the PlayStation 5’s life cycle. Were it not for the ongoing component shortage, we’d likely have heard more about the PlayStation 6 by now. An all-digital PS6 theoretically uses fewer parts and the games are cheaper to publish, which lowers the per-unit cost for Sony as it develops the new hardware.
However, Sony’s decision to sunset physical media in a year-and-a-half is faster than most analysts’ craziest predictions, most of whom figured it’d take at least another decade to fully phase discs out. Even at its lowest point, per Circana’s math, physical media in video games represents $1.9 billion in consumer sales. That’s not insignificant.
Sony’s competitors have yet to react in any significant way. Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, currently known under the codename Project Helix, is rumored to be an all-digital system, and Microsoft has famously been trying to get out of the physical media business since at least 2013.
That year, Microsoft announced at E3 that the Xbox One would have significant measures in place to keep players from reselling their physical games, which led to widespread outcry online. The next day, Sony’s president went onstage and proclaimed the PS4 would do none of that — which gave it a big head of steam going into a console generation Sony went on to win.
Thirteen years later, Sony is making Microsoft’s old bet.
The irony is that Sony itself underscored one of the biggest issues with ditching physical media last Sunday. On June 26, Sony sent a number of users in the United Kingdom an email to notify them that due to the end of a license agreement, 551 shows and movies that were previously available on the PlayStation Network would be removed from the service. Consumers who’d previously thought they’d made a purchase were suddenly informed that it had actually been a multi-year rental.
That’s the central problem of the streaming era for end users: you only have anything in your digital library for as long as the library’s owner decides you do. An all-digital future means you own nothing. At best, you have limited viewership rights that can be revoked at short notice.
Most worryingly, however, the shift to an all-digital future effectively raises the cost of entry to the console market, at a point when the price of gaming is already rising. If there are no physical discs for the PlayStation 6, then you can’t swap discs with a buddy or defray a purchase by trading an old game back to a store.
This is a relatively sudden disruption to the console market, and through it, to the games industry as a whole. It’s likely to have a series of knock-on effects for the next few years, and sets an early tone for the upcoming 10th generation of console hardware.
While it’s still possible that consumer outcry could get Sony to reverse course here, or offer some intermediary solution like USB disc drives, the end of physical gaming media has analysts and players alike asking a lot of tough questions about costs, preservation, and consumer convenience. The games industry is changing faster than expected in 2026, and is likely to be nearly unrecognizable by this time next year.
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Archiving is about accumulating historical records or materials. The scope and reason for a particular archive can differ, such as a company’s archive with financial records, an engineering department’s archive of technical references, or a museum’s archive of physical artefacts. Whatever the reason, the same goal applies: the maintaining or creating of a historical timeline that can be later referenced as needed.
