Germany’s ICS Game Archive Shuts Down After Losing Public Funding

Germany’s largest video game preservation project, the Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), is shutting down after its public funding expired and a proposal for a permanent physical facility was rejected. The archive, which held over 60,000 titles across cartridge, floppy, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray formats, was launched in 2019 with a mission to build the world’s largest publicly accessible collection for research and education. Backed by €1.5 million from the Berlin Senate and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the ICS became a non-profit in 2023, but that funding ran out in April 2026. A plan to secure long-term institutional support for a dedicated archival space was deemed “unviable” by the Berlin State Department, as it would exceed the project’s current scope in cost and complexity. Without that support, the ICS’s organisers have conceded the effort cannot continue. The physical holdings will return to their original owners, while the future of the digital archive is uncertain pending legal and technical review. This is a bitter setback for game preservation. The ICS’s collapse is a warning that institutional memory of the medium still depends on fragile funding cycles, and that a public responsibility to preserve games has yet to be taken seriously by governments.