Video game preservation is a form of preservation applied to the video game industry that includes, but is not limited to, digital preservation. Such preservation efforts include archiving development source code and art assets, digital copies of video games, emulation of video game hardware, maintenance and preservation of specialized video game hardware such as arcade games and video game consoles, and digitization of print video game magazines and books prior to the Digital Revolution.

Besides retaining the ability to play games from the past, preservation of video games enables research on the history of video games as well as ways for developers to look at older games to build ideas from. There is also interest in the preservation of cancelled video games that were known to be in development, as coupled with the reasons for cancellation, they can provide an understanding of the technical and creative aspects, or lack thereof, at the time of the game's development.

Unlike some examples of other forms of media like books, art and photography, and film, which antedate the mid-20th century and which can be preserved in a variety of formats that are not prohibited by more-recent intellectual property (IP) laws, video games typically require specialized and/or proprietary computer hardware and software to read and execute game software. However, as technology advances, these older game systems become obsolete, no longer produced nor maintained to use for executing games. The media formats of the early days of computer gaming, relying on floppy discs and CD-ROMs, suffer from disc rot and degrade over time, making it difficult to recover information. Further, video games tend to rely on other resources like operating systems, network connectivity, and external servers outside control of users, and making sure these boundary aspects to a video game are preserved along with the game are also essential.

According to a 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), 87% of video games released in the United States before 2010 (at the onset of digital distribution) have been lost or are at risk of being lost due to lack of video game preservation due to the difficulties involved. One period of the video game industry that has received a great deal of attention is up through the 1980s. Games prior to the mid-1980s have been compared to the silent era for films, where much of the gameplay and language of video games was established. Yet, as a result of the video game crash of 1983, many companies involved in developing games folded or were acquired by other companies. In this process, the source code for many games prior to the crash were lost or destroyed, leaving only previously sold copies of games on their original format as evidence of their existence. Even of companies that survived the crash, long-term planning towards preservation was not always a consideration. Both Nintendo and Sega are considered part of the few companies from this period known to have actively worked to backup and retain their games, even those that were cancelled or unreleased, over time.

Code and assets can be lost during consolidation of companies or similar business activities; for example the assets for the 1997 Blade Runner game were lost when Electronic Arts had physically moved Westwood Studios following their acquisition, making it difficult for Night Dive Studios to attempt a remaster of the game around 2020. Another example includes the original code and art asset files for Starcraft (1998), which were lost during the development for StarCraft: Remastered. As a result, the sprites had to be redone from scratch. Physical archives of older game material can also be suspectible to losses when companies clear out or consolidate offices. Several Japanese developers that were first founded in the 1980s and 1990s, including Square Enix, Capcom, Taito and Sega, have committed their own internal efforts to keep physical archives in special locations to prevent accidental disposal while also working to digitize these assets. The rights to older games have also defaulted to persons that may have been tangentially involved with the game and are unaware of their rights' ownership. In one case GOG.com stated they had to hire a private investigator to locate such a rights-holder for games they wanted to preserve that was otherwise living off the grid.

Preservation also has become an issue with the prevalence of digital distribution on console platforms; as manufacturers drop support for older hardware, games that exist only in digital form may be lost. This issue came to light when Sony Interactive Entertainment announced plans to shut down storefronts for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita by mid-2021, though which Sony later reversed, leaving the PlayStation 3 and Vita stores open indefinitely, while limiting PlayStation Portable purchases to the Vita and PlayStation 3 storefronts. An estimated 2,200 games across these platforms were only available digitally, and while most have versions on other platforms, about 120 were exclusive to the Sony platform and would become completely unavailable after the stores' closure. Prior to reversing their decision, Sony did not provide any immediate plans to offer these titles by other means. In 2022, Sony started its own preservation team, which by March 2025, had saved over 1,000 builds (including alpha and beta builds in addition to releases) available by various means on the PlayStation 5, including source code and art assets.

Nintendo faced similar concerns when they announced plans to shutter the Nintendo eShop for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS by March 2023, which would remove around 1,000 digital-only games from availability. While some games available digitally are also offered in a physical retail product, the contents of the physical product may only be a portion of the game or a redemption key for a digital storefront. Additionally, digital games may be reliant on middleware solutions from third parties that may have gone out of business, making it near impossible to recover the full game even if the game developer has full source code available. Even preservation of non-commercial games have drawn attention. Ahead of the discontinuation of the Adobe Flash plugin in 2020, sites like the Internet Archive took steps to develop a secure sandbox version of Flash and archived thousands of free Flash games that had been made over the previous two decades.

An additional challenge are games that receive frequent updates that can change the nature of the game over time, such as those offered as games as a service such as MMOs and mobile games. These games also face issues when the supporting servers are shut down by the publisher or developer; unless the game is updated to split off the server dependencies, such as the case for Kingdom Hearts X, these games become unplayable and lost to preservationists. While preservationists can attempt to get copies of all intermediate states of a game, the use of video from gamers playing over streaming services has become more valuable to showcase the intermediate state of those games. Preservation of server-based games can still leave legal issues around copyright as a concern to the original game owner; for example, Atlus filed a lawsuit in late 2021 against players that had recreated the servers and client software for the defunct Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, claiming the fan-run project "caused and will continue to cause irreparable damage to Atlus". In the wake of Ubisoft's shuttering of the servers for The Crew, an initiative called Stop Killing Games, led by Ross Scott, the creator of Freeman's Mind, was launched in 2024 to urge companies to either stop shutting down services for live games or assure they are still playable if the game's servers are shuttered. This has generally received higher focus in the European Union countries, where there are more protection for consumers.