Executive Overview
As the video game industry marches steadily toward an all-digital future, a quiet yet catastrophic crisis looms over cultural heritage: the potential erasure of an entire generation of interactive media. While blockbuster franchises like Halo or Call of Duty may remain accessible through corporate storefronts—albeit modified or degraded over time—thousands of indie titles, niche projects, and digital-only releases face total oblivion.
Enter Dr. Colin Post, an assistant professor of information, library, and research sciences at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG). Post’s pioneering research into how public, academic, and school libraries can preserve and distribute digital video games has never been more urgent. His work recently received a massive boost following a pivotal legal victory against federal funding cuts, arriving just as tech giants cement a disc-less future that threatens to obliterate the secondhand market and institutional archiving alike.
This comprehensive report examines the intersection of federal funding politics, institutional resilience, the impending death of physical media, and the heroic efforts of researchers like Post to establish a standardized framework for digital game preservation before it is too late.
Detailed Chronology: From Federal Funding Cuts to Historic Legal Reversals
The road to the upcoming Digital Games in Libraries Virtual Forum, scheduled for October 2026, has been nothing short of tumultuous. The initiative’s timeline maps a turbulent landscape of political interference, grassroots legal resistance, and eventual administrative capitulation.
Early 2025: The Sudden Freeze
Dr. Colin Post was deep into preliminary research funded by a federal grant when the political landscape shifted dramatically. The incoming Trump administration enacted sweeping executive actions, abruptly rescinding already-awarded grants across the sciences, arts, humanities, and museum sectors.
Among the casualties was the funding allocated to Post’s initiative, which was designed to underwrite a virtual conference bringing together librarians, game developers, publishers, and legal experts. The goal was ambitious yet straightforward: outline what a modern, functional library game collection program could look like in the 21st century. By April 2025, with funds frozen, Post was forced to hit the brakes on planning the virtual forum.
Late 2025: State Attorneys General Fight Back
The freezing of grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) did not go unchallenged. Recognizing the existential threat posed to community services, Attorneys General from more than 20 states immediately filed lawsuits against the administration.
The legal battle moved swiftly through the courts, culminating in a major victory for libraries and cultural institutions in November 2025, when a federal court ruled the funding cuts unlawful. Though the Trump administration initially appealed the decision, mounting pressure and legal unviability led the administration to officially withdraw its appeal in April 2026.
April 2026: A Historic Victory for Libraries
The withdrawal of the appeal unlocked the frozen funds, securing what American Library Association (ALA) President Sam Helmick hailed as a historic win.
"Today’s action finally lays to rest President Trump’s executive order that threatened countless library services available to anyone who walks into one of our nation’s 115,000 public, school, academic and other libraries," Helmick stated at the time.
With the financial backing restored, Post immediately resumed preparations. The Digital Games in Libraries Virtual Forum was officially slated for October 2026, utilizing the virtual engagement space Gather to host 11 diverse speakers spanning law, game development, academic research, and library sciences. Following the forum, the remaining grant money will fund specialized working groups to untangle the complex technical, legal, and logistical hurdles of collecting and distributing digital games through public-facing institutions.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Death of Physical Media and the Digital Precipice
Post’s crusade for digital preservation aligns chillingly with broader industry shifts that are rapidly shrinking the lifespan of video game history.
Sony’s 2028 Deadline and the Eradication of the Secondhand Market
In early July 2026, Sony Interactive Entertainment dropped a bombshell announcement that fundamentally altered the landscape of console gaming: the company will officially end physical disc production for all new PlayStation games starting in January 2028.
From that point forward, PlayStation users will have no choice but to purchase software strictly through digital storefronts. While consumer trends have leaned heavily toward digital downloads due to convenience, this abrupt transition effectively sounds the death knell for the physical secondhand market—a cornerstone of affordability and historical accessibility.
Explaining the company’s rationale, Sony Interactive Entertainment Content Communications Director Sid Shuman wrote on the official PlayStation blog:
"This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today."
The Parallels to the Flash-Pocalypse
For preservationists, Sony’s announcement is less an evolution and more an alarm bell. Dr. Post warns that without structured institutional intervention, an entire medium is at active risk of disappearing.
He points to the historical precedent of Adobe Flash. When support for Flash ended, decades of browser-based digital art, animation, and independent gaming vanished almost overnight because no systemic, centralized preservation safety net was in place. Today, independent developers are already living entirely in a "disc-less present," releasing their titles exclusively on platforms like Itch.io and Steam. Without libraries and archives stepping up to ingest these digital-only artifacts, future generations will find vast blank spots in digital cultural history.
Official Statements and Industry Insights
Dispelling the Myth of Developer Hostility
One of the most profound discoveries in Post’s preliminary research challenges the prevailing narrative pushed by corporate lobbyists. Major trade associations often paint libraries and archives as entities hostile to intellectual property rights, framing public access models as threats to developer revenue.
Post found the exact opposite to be true when speaking directly with creators.
"One of the really encouraging findings from those conversations was that there was just across the board enthusiastic interest in [game developers] having their games collected in libraries," Post notes. "Which if you sort of only listen to the Entertainment Software Association and their lobbyists, you would think that libraries are out to destroy games, and you hear the same thing from book publishers too."
Far from opposing preservation, independent and mid-tier developers are eager to see their life’s work safeguarded in academic and public archives, ensuring they are not lost to corporate server shutdowns or delisting policies.
The Problem with Current Infrastructure
Currently, libraries face a severe structural deficit. While many institutions successfully lend physical cartridges and discs, they possess zero standardized methodologies for acquiring, hosting, managing, or distributing digital-only games.
Compounding this issue is the reality of modern physical media. Even when a game ships on a physical disc today, it frequently requires a constant internet connection and communication with corporate servers to function. Once a publisher decides to shut down those servers—a common occurrence for live-service and multiplayer titles—even physical discs are reduced to useless plastic.
Future Outlook: Global Collaboration and the Fight Against "Enshittification"
As Post builds out the framework for the Digital Games in Libraries initiative, he is not operating in a vacuum. He has already forged international partnerships with academic pioneers tackling the same crisis abroad.
The Ludolio Project in Australia
At the University of Sydney, a team of forward-thinking researchers has developed a pilot project called Ludolio. Designed as a functional system for lending digital games to universities and schools, Ludolio currently aggregates and distributes titles created by Australian developers. Recognizing the synergy between Ludolio’s architecture and his own research goals, Post has initiated direct collaborations with the Australian team to share insights and scale regional models into a broader, globally minded network.
Why Corporate Stewardship Is Not Enough
Post pulls no punches when discussing the motivations of corporate giants like Sony and Microsoft. While corporate entities will undoubtedly maintain access to hyper-lucrative cash cows like Halo or Call of Duty, those products are subject to what tech critic Cory Doctorow famously terms "enshittification"—the gradual degradation of service quality, ad saturation, monetization creep, and artificial restriction designed to squeeze every last cent out of the consumer base.
Furthermore, corporate archives are closed-door operations driven by profit margins, not public access or historical completeness.
"We’ve seen the warning signs that this is a thing we need to be thinking about, and then the announcement," Post emphasizes. "It’s not some niche thing. The entirety of a medium is at risk of not being preserved. We can’t trust Sony, we can’t trust Microsoft to preserve things. They’re going to keep Halo and Call of Duty available, but those things are going to become enshittified as well."
He concludes with a stark warning that serves as a rallying cry for the entire library and archival community:
"If we don’t start taking collection action now among the people and institutions that care about the culture, care about preserving the work, then we’re going to lose out."
Looking Toward October 2026 and Beyond
With federal funding restored, the legal battles temporarily settled, and international academic partnerships taking root, the upcoming Digital Games in Libraries Virtual Forum in October 2026 represents a watershed moment.
By uniting legal minds, game developers, researchers, and library professionals, Dr. Colin Post and his peers are laying the foundational bricks for a digital sanctuary. If successful, this movement will ensure that future historians, educators, and players will not inherit a sanitized, corporate-curated ghost town of gaming history, but a rich, accessible, and comprehensively preserved digital archive of human creativity.
