PlayStation has established an ‘IP preservation’ team

PlayStation has created a new “IP preservation” team, and it’s hired one of its first members.

Senior build engineer Garrett Fredley recently revealed PlayStation’s new preservation efforts on Twitter and LinkedIn (via VGC).

The team will be led by PlayStation Studios global QA manager Mike Bishop, who stated on Twitter that its “day-to-day focus is on IP Preservation for the business, ensuring the titles of today are captured, catalogued and secured for the games industry of tomorrow.”

This is not the first preservation team that Fredley has worked for. Previously, Fredley served as a software engineer at Electronic Arts and “solely led the preservation efforts for the FIFA franchise, resulting in the complete archival of multiple titles.”

It’s unclear exactly what, if anything, this team will do for PlayStation users. This biggest obstacle to game preservation throughout the last few decades have been how publishers maintain complete discretion over what happens to their games, even if it means they will be kept on hard drives and lost forever to players.

One area where this preservation team could benefit PlayStation users is with Sony’s new tiered subscription service for PlayStation Plus. The Premium tier gives players access to a select library of PlayStation 2, Playstation 3, and PSP titles, but PS3 titles can only be streamed. Hopefully, Fredley and company can work on figuring out that pesky PS3 emulation that would make those games downloadable.