Germany’s Ambitious Video Game Archive Is Shutting Down, Leaving 60,000 Titles in Limbo
Germany’s plan to preserve video game history on a massive public scale has suffered a major setback. The Internationale Computerspielesammlung, known as ICS, is being shut down after its public funding expired at the end of April and was not renewed by the federal government.
The project was designed to become the world’s largest publicly accessible video game archive. Since 2012, it had brought together an extraordinary collection of more than 60,000 catalogued games, spanning cartridges, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray releases. Beyond the games themselves, the archive also included manuals, original packaging, and gaming hardware, making it an important resource for researchers, historians, developers, and anyone interested in the evolution of interactive entertainment.
According to reports from Germany, the shareholders behind the project voted unanimously to close it down. While the physical items are not being destroyed or discarded, the long-term future of the shared database remains uncertain. That database is one of the most valuable parts of the project, as it organizes tens of thousands of entries into a searchable public catalogue. Whether that digital infrastructure can be preserved is now under legal and technical review.
The ICS collection was built through cooperation between several major German institutions, including the country’s game-ratings authority USK, the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the industry association Game, and the University of Potsdam. Its online catalogue launched in April 2019, giving the public access to a large digital index of video game history.
The shutdown comes down to money. The archive had received roughly €1.5 million in public funding from the Berlin Senate and the federal government’s culture commissioner. That support only lasted until late April. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, which became responsible for games policy in 2025, reviewed whether the archive could receive permanent institutional funding. The ministry ultimately decided that the cost and scope of maintaining the project were not economically viable.
Berlin economics senator Franziska Giffey had already warned earlier in the year that continued support was not guaranteed. Now, with funding gone, the future of one of Europe’s most important video game preservation projects is unclear.
The closure highlights a growing problem for game preservation worldwide. Unlike books, films, or music, video games often depend on fragile hardware, aging storage media, online servers, licensing agreements, and copy protection systems. Once a game is no longer sold, supported, or playable on modern systems, it can quickly become inaccessible.
A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network found that 87 percent of classic games released in the United States are no longer commercially available. Researchers compared the situation unfavorably with the survival rate of American silent films, a field already famous for major cultural losses.
Legal restrictions also make preservation more difficult. In October 2024, the US Copyright Office once again declined to approve a copyright exemption that would have allowed libraries and archives to share preserved video games remotely with researchers. This marked the fourth rejection of such an exemption since 2015.
Community-run preservation projects are also under pressure. Myrient, a volunteer-operated archive containing around 390 terabytes of preserved games, announced earlier this year that it would shut down because of rising costs. Its founder said the service had become unsustainable due to expensive infrastructure, heavy traffic, abuse by commercial download tools, and donations that could not keep up with demand.
Storage costs have become a major issue for preservation efforts. As data centers expand and demand for storage hardware increases, maintaining large digital archives has become more expensive. In Myrient’s case, volunteers were able to back up the entire archive before it went offline, but not every preservation project is that fortunate.
The timing of the ICS shutdown is especially concerning as the gaming industry continues moving away from physical media. Sony has confirmed plans to end physical PlayStation disc production in 2028, a shift that could make future preservation even more complicated. If more games are released only through digital storefronts, subscription services, or cloud platforms, archivists may have fewer opportunities to preserve complete, playable copies.
For players, the loss of an archive like ICS may seem distant at first. But video game preservation is about more than nostalgia. Games are part of modern culture, art, technology, design, and social history. They reflect the hardware limitations, creative trends, business models, and communities of their time. Without organized efforts to preserve them, entire chapters of gaming history could disappear.
The physical pieces of the ICS collection remain with the institutions that own them, but the shared catalogue and digital systems that connected them are now at risk. If no solution is found, Germany may lose a major public gateway into video game history, even if the games themselves remain scattered across different organizations.
The closure of the Internationale Computerspielesammlung is a reminder that preserving video games requires more than passion. It requires long-term funding, legal support, technical expertise, and public recognition that games are cultural artifacts worth protecting. Without that support, even a collection of 60,000 titles can become vulnerable.
