PlayStation has set up a new ‘game preservation’ team, according to a new employee.
Garrett Fredley, who had previously been working as a build engineer for Canadian mobile developer Kabam, has now joined PlayStation as a senior build engineer.
Celebrating his new employment, Fredley posted a message on his Twitter and LinkedIn pages expressing his excitement at joining the new ‘preservation’ team.
“Today is my first day as a senior build engineer for PlayStation, working as one of their initial hires for the newly created Preservation team,” Fredley wrote.
“Game preservation was my first career passion. It was my first foray into the world of software engineering / dev ops, and into a world that so many are unaware of. I was just a novice back then, contributing any way I could regardless of my inexperience. Now, I’m back to it, no longer the novice I once was.
“Thank you [global head of QA] Mike Bishop and the team for bringing me on board for this adventure. Let’s go and ensure our industry’s history isn’t forgotten.”
Fredley had worked for EA between 2016 and 2019, where he “solely led the preservation efforts for the FIFA franchise, resulting in the complete archival of multiple titles”.
It’s not yet clear what his new role will entail, or exactly what this new ‘game preservation’ team’s aims will be.
Last month Sony announced that it would be bringing classic games to the PS5 via its new PS Plus Premium subscription.
When it launches for $17.99/£13.49 a month, subscribers will gain benefits including access to 340 games from the original PlayStation, PS2, PS3 and PSP generations.
However, while the majority of those games will be available to download and play on PS5 via emulation, Sony confirmed that PS3 games would only be playable via cloud streaming.
Sony has recently been criticised for making decisions said to be harmful to game preservation.
Last year it confirmed that it would be closing the PS3, Vita and PSP digital stores in summer 2021, news that was met with widespread backlash due to the number of digital-only games that would no longer be made available.
The platform holder made a partial u-turn the following month, with SIE president Jim Ryan saying it had realised it had made “the wrong decision” in planning to close the stores.
The PS3 and Vita stores were kept open for now, but the PSP store was closed as planned on July 2, 2021, meaning around 35 digital-only PSP games are now no longer available to buy anywhere in any form.
