We are an international community dedicated to the preservation of video games and their respective systems.
What is our goal?
We are testing physical video games and hardware completely offline to inform you about issues that can make them unusable now and in the future. Along the way, we want to highlight positive examples of preservation as well. Thereby, we want to raise awareness about the importance of game preservation and consumer rights.
What criteria do we take into account?
Our testing focuses on several aspects within two crucial areas:
- Offline playability
- Dependency on downloads (bugfixes & content) to play
We check whether or not games and hardware can be played without any additional tools, patches, account log-ins or without any other forms of digital rights management (DRM) getting in the way.
Basically, we aim to tell you whether or not everything works fine right out of the box, because we cannot rely on services, updates and content downloads to be available forever.
You can find our methodology and classification here.
Why is this important?
While people mostly look at games as the largest entertainment industry on the planet and too often just its gigantic revenue to explain their importance, they are also of global significance because their cultural impact shapes society and influences our daily lives.
They have been doing so for decades at this point and are a true form of art. The intention behind our work and game preservation as a whole is simply to preserve a huge element of mankind’s history.
In addition, issues that will cause problems with preservation in the future have struck customers in the here and now as well. Just think of:
- Internet outages
- unavailable servers
- expired licenses
- delistings
- closed storefronts
All this can cause our favorite games to stop working or even disappear in an instant. All these aren’t dreamt-up scenarios, but real occurrences happening basically all the time.
Collaboration
DoesItPlay also works in partnership with the Nintendo Revised community – a group dedicated to finding and cataloging re-releases of Nintendo Switch games with revised cartridges. Thanks to this great team for their contribution. You can find their work on the dedicated Switch Carts Revisions page and on our Switch test reports.
Occasionally, we receive copies of games for our testing as well as giveaways from publishers. For transparency, whenever this is the case, we will disclose this fact in our communication and on the test pages.
Social Media & Contact
Our main channel is X (formerly Twitter), where you can stay informed of our latest tests. Our much appreciated supporters on Patreon can also join us on Discord and see first hand what we are working on.
Although the results of our core work will always remain public, your financial support is important to cover infrastructure costs and further expenses like acquiring games and hardware to test. Please consider donating on Patreon to aid our work.
Our project is now administered by Clemens Istel (paToclemente), who created the first version of our database. Additional database admin is Destruction Games. Our website was created and is managed by Raymater. More information about us on our legal notice.
Contact: contact@doesitplay.org