SweetieGames

Earlier this week, I read that John Wick Hex, the only official John Wick video game, is being delisted from all platforms. By the time this article goes live, this will have already happened. No reason was given for its removal, and I feel it only made the news on big video game sites because it’s attached to a well established IP. But the truth is, situations like these are happening all the time. Games pulled from digital shelves for seemingly no reason, closed off from bringing in new fans as they only exist online as digital copies. Sometimes, at the end of a game’s life there’s only a handful of massively overpriced physical copies left in the world.

Thankfully, people who own the John Wick game will still be able to play it after it’s delisted, but this isn’t always the case for delisted games or online games at the end of their life. Many online games or mobile games become completely unplayable once service ends, leaving only a few YouTube videos or screenshots as evidence that they ever existed. Some of my favourite visual novel games from my teen years met with this fate, and it breaks my heart that now their service has ended, they are completely non functional, even through an emulator. Many of these games become partial or fully lost media.

You always think of lost media as being old kids shows from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, A lot of video games from this era are actually more endangered than we thought; according to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of classic video games released in the United States are classed as critically endangered. We never think that such a thing will happen with modern games; we’re told that things on the internet are there forever, but this just isn’t the case. Obscure apps and games created today can easily become partially or fully lost media because they don’t exist for long enough or aren’t popular enough to be documented properly. There are games I downloaded to my phone back in the early 2010s which are now completely gone, with no indication that they ever existed; a common experience for many video game fans. We’ve all found ourselves on the Tip of my Joystick subreddit trying to find them!

The topic of dying games has been circling around the mainstream a lot lately, with the Stop Killing Games petition garnering over 1.3 Million EU signatures at the time of writing. The petition, which aims to challenge the legality of publishers making their games obsolete once service ends, states that the way many games are currently designed to become unplayable at the end of service is detrimental to customers as well as making game preservation incredibly difficult. If the petition is successful, it will make it illegal in many countries for developers to purposefully destroy the games that they have sold; a huge milestone in preventing the death of thousands of games. I would love to see games that previously would have faded into nothingness being preserved in some capacity for future video game fans; its unfathomable how many games we have missed out on because they’ve become nothing once they’re pulled from shelves or once service ends. And we’ve not even touched on the sheer amount of money that has been spent on games by fans only to completely lose their product once the game shuts down!

With petitions like these, there is a glimmer of hope that video game preservation will be easier. There are older games that I would love to have played but the lack of preservation has made this impossible. Games should be accessible for new fans to enjoy in some capacity, and customers should be able to enjoy the products they paid for! It would be a tragedy if 87% of current games also became critically endangered in future generations.