PlayStation has Created a Game Preservation Team [IGN]

Revealed by a new employee’s Twitter and LinkedIn posts (as spotted by Video Games Chronicle) the division will focus on preserving PlayStation IPs to “ensure our industry’s history isn’t forgotten”.

Garrett Fredley said his new role of senior build engineer is one of PlayStation’s initial hires for “the newly created 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 😊

— Garrett Fredley (@SomeCronzaGuy) April 25, 2022

PlayStation Studios’ global QA manager Mike Bishop hired Fredley and said in another post – presumably about the same team – that “the day-to-day focus is on IP Preservation for the business, ensuring the titles of today are captured, catalogued, and secured for the games industry of tomorrow.”

With Fredley being an initial hire, the preservation team still appears to be in its early stages but will seemingly focus on ensuring the longevity of PlayStation games that date as far back as 1994 when the original console was released.

PlayStation has shown a little more commitment to its retro library recently with the announcement of its new PlayStation Plus tiers, the most expensive of which includes access to hundreds of PS1, PS2, and PSP games.

While the timelines align on the preservation team hirings and the new PS Plus tiers it’s unclear how closely linked the two departments are, if at all.

The importance of preservation has been an ongoing conversation for years amid concerns that video games, as a relatively young and mostly digital form of media, will be lost to time when older hardware stops being supported.

Apple was criticised earlier this week for removing games from the App Store that haven’t been recently updated, potentially causing countless completed games to be deleted.

IGN has reached out to Sony for comment.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.