Square Enix's Preservation Plan? Upload to YouTube

"For other titles, we preserve cutscenes on video streaming platforms."

That's a direct quote from Square Enix, delivered at its recent annual shareholder meeting in response to a question about game preservation. Read it again. A company sitting on one of the deepest back catalogues in gaming history, spanning four decades of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, and NieR, was asked how it plans to keep its older software accessible. Its answer was, in part, that it puts cutscenes on YouTube.

The full response, shared from the shareholder meeting, reads:

"How we enable customers to enjoy a game after service has ended depends on the nature of a title. For instance, for the Nier series, we share information through official livestreams. For other titles, we preserve cutscenes on video streaming platforms. We will continue to create pathways befitting each title to ensure that players are able to enjoy them even after service has ended or the story has reached its end."

I've read a lot of corporate non-answers in this job. This one is special. It manages to use the word "preserve" while describing something that is the opposite of preservation. Uploading cutscenes to a streaming platform preserves a game the way photographing a building preserves architecture. You can look at it, sure. You cannot walk through it.

What Gets Lost

The question at the shareholder meeting specifically flagged that much of Square Enix's original software is unavailable on modern systems, and that live-service and mobile-only titles have been shut down with no way for players to return to them. These aren't hypothetical concerns. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and the mobile game Kingdom Hearts X exist in the HD collections only as movies stitched together from their cutscenes. The Game Boy Advance version of Chain of Memories has never been ported; only the PS2 remake made it into 1.5 Remix. Even NieR, which Square Enix name-dropped as an example of its preservation efforts, is only available in its remastered form on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The original PS3 version? Gone from storefronts.

Square Enix is far from the only publisher with this problem. But most publishers don't get asked directly about preservation and then cite YouTube as part of the solution.

This conversation is happening against a specific backdrop. Sony announced earlier this year that it will no longer support physical disc releases for new PlayStation games from 2028 onward. That decision reignited a fierce debate about digital ownership, delisting, and what happens to games when the only copy lives on a server a corporation controls. Campaigns like Stop Killing Games have pushed for consumer legislation that would require publishers to keep sold products functional. Square Enix's response at its shareholder meeting suggests the company views preservation as a content problem, not an access problem. Share the story, not the game.

I think this framing is wrongly consequential. Games are not movies. A cutscene ripped from Final Fantasy VII and uploaded to a streaming platform does not preserve what it felt like to play Final Fantasy VII. The combat, the exploration, the moment-to-moment decisions a player makes, all of that disappears. What you're left with is a summary, not an experience. And Square Enix knows this, because it keeps remaking and remastering these games and charging full price for them. The company clearly believes the interactive element has value. It just doesn't seem to believe that value extends to the original versions.

Square Enix has been on a strong run of announcements lately. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, a new Kingdom Hearts 4 trailer, and an update on the long-awaited Dragon Quest 12 all landed in the past month. The company is investing heavily in its future catalogue. But preservation isn't about the next game. It's about whether the last one still exists in five years, or ten, or twenty.

The Revenue Problem

The uncomfortable truth is that preservation doesn't generate revenue, and Square Enix's shareholder meeting is a venue where revenue is the entire point. Keeping a 2004 DS game playable on modern hardware costs engineering time and money with no obvious return. I get why it's not a priority in a boardroom. But "we uploaded the cutscenes" isn't a preservation strategy. It's an admission that the company has no preservation strategy and would prefer you didn't notice.

Other companies have done better. GOG has built an entire business around keeping old games running on modern systems. Microsoft's backward compatibility program on Xbox made hundreds of original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles playable on current hardware. Neither approach is perfect, but both treat the actual game as the thing worth saving. Square Enix's answer treats the game as disposable and the marketing materials as the archive.

If the industry is going to go fully digital, and Sony's 2028 deadline suggests it will, then answers like this one from Square Enix should worry every player who cares about being able to revisit a game they love. A YouTube playlist is not a library. It's a trailer reel for something you can no longer buy.