- Sony is creating a games preservation team.
- This team is focused on "IP Preservation for the business" right now.
- Sony is including select older PlayStation games in the upcoming revamp of PlayStation Plus.
Sony is taking game preservation more seriously, with the recent creation of an official team to handle the subject.
Senior build engineer Garrett Fredley shared on Twitter that he'd been hired at PlayStation for the "newly created Preservation team." Additionally, Global QA manager for PlayStation Studios Mike Bishop shared on LinkedIn that the team was hiring.
"We have a really interesting, exciting, and unique technical opportunity within the team right now - 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," Bishop wrote.
Game preservation and emulation has become a hot topic in recent years, as more and more games are no longer legally accessible on the latest gaming hardware. Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, stated in November 2021 that he wants to see better game preservation across the industry.
Microsoft began a robust backward compatibility program for Xbox consoles in 2015, adding hundreds of Xbox 360 — and later, original Xbox — games to the system, allowing anyone with an Xbox One, Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S to play the games. 70 more games were added in November 2021, though Microsoft noted that this will almost certainly be the final batch due to exhausting legal avenues for licensing.
The PS5 is backward compatible with PS4 games, but not with older games. Sony has confirmed that select PS1, PS2, and PSP games will be included with the upcoming revamp for PlayStation Plus, though exactly how the system will work or what games will be included has not yet been confirmed.
The PlayStation Plus revamp is currently slated to take place in June 2022, specifically June 13 for anyone in North America.
