Of the approximately 400,000 video games released since the medium's commercial birth in the early 1970s through 2010, only about 13% — roughly 52,000 — remain commercially available in any form, according to a landmark study by the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network. The remaining 87% can only be accessed through second-hand physical copies, illegal emulation, or the increasingly rare preserved copies held by libraries and archives. The study, three years in the making, is the most comprehensive attempt to quantify what preservation advocates have been warning about for decades: the cultural record of an entire artistic medium is being lost.

The causes of game unavailability are structural. Unlike films, which were preserved by a studio system that valued their libraries, video games were historically treated as disposable products. Copyright law has also been an obstacle: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions effectively criminalize the software modifications necessary to keep old games running on modern hardware, and repeated requests by libraries and archives for DMCA exemptions have been only partially granted. The recent US Copyright Office ruling expanding preservation access was a partial victory — it allows libraries to provide remote access to preserved games for research purposes but not for general public access.

"What is at stake is not just nostalgia," said Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation. "Video games are the dominant artistic and cultural medium of the 21st century. If we had lost 87% of films from before 1960, we would consider it a cultural catastrophe. But because games are software, and software has been treated as a product rather than a cultural artifact, we are watching the same catastrophe happen in real time." The study has generated legislative interest, with several members of Congress calling for hearings on digital preservation and reform of copyright law as it applies to abandoned software.