Germany's largest game archive closes, leaving 60,000 game files unaccounted for

The Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), a German effort to build the world's largest publicly accessible video game archive, is being shut down after roughly €1.5 million in public funding expired at the end of April and the federal government declined to renew it. GamesWirtschaft reported on July 3 that the project's shareholders voted unanimously to shut it down, leaving the future of its database of more than 60,000 catalogued titles unresolved.

The ICS held more than 60,000 games spread across cartridge, floppy disk, CD, DVD and Blu-ray formats, alongside manuals, packaging, and hardware. The collection has been assembled since 2012 from Germany's game-ratings authority USK, the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the industry association Game, and the University of Potsdam. Its public online catalogue launched in April 2019 with tens of thousands of entries.

The physical holdings remain with the institutions that own them. Whether the shared database and its supporting infrastructure survive is still under legal and technical review.

Funding for the ICS came from the Berlin Senate and the federal government's culture commissioner and ran only through late April. Germany's Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, which took over responsibility for games policy in 2025, examined a model for permanent institutional funding and concluded it was not economically viable given the scale of the work involved. Berlin economics senator Franziska Giffey had cautioned earlier in the year that support beyond April was not guaranteed.

The ICS shutdown adds to a growing list of setbacks for organized game preservation. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network found that 87 percent of classic games released in the US are out of print and commercially unavailable, a survival rate the researchers placed below that of American silent films. In October 2024, the US Copyright Office refused for the fourth time since 2015 to grant a DMCA exemption that would let libraries share preserved games with remote researchers, siding with the Entertainment Software Association.

Fan-run archives face a related but different set of pressures. Myrient, a volunteer-run repository holding roughly 390 terabytes of preserved games, announced in February that it would shut down the following month. Its founder, who goes by Alexey, said rapidly rising infrastructure costs, abuse of the platform's unlimited downloads by for-profit download managers, and donations that failed to keep pace with rising traffic had made the service unsustainable.

Alexey pointed to sharp increases in the price of storage hardware, driven in part by surging data center demand, as a central factor behind the closure. Volunteers later backed up Myrient's entire archive in full before it went offline.

The ICS collapse comes in the same week that Sony confirmed it will end physical PlayStation disc production in 2028, a move that will make future archival efforts more difficult as fewer games are ever released in a physical, extractable format.