Factors Influencing Collection Policy
- Selection process
- Priority is given to materials that are requested in support of academic teaching, research, game-development and esports application first; specific patron demand second; recreational utility third, and historical preservation value fourth.
- In determining recreational utility and preservation value, 10 or more year-end, best-of lists are compiled and analyzed, and ranked according to popularity by title. Equally weighted consideration is given to other types of games which don’t tend to make best-of lists, such as annually updating franchises, sports games, MSU-connected or indie studios, etc..
- Anticipated future trends
- Copies of MSU student-created games (coursework, theses, dissertations, etc.) may be included at some point, pending the development of infrastructure and agreements to support it.
- Physical editions becoming unavailable is a potential trend we foresee. To that end, we hope to partner with like-minded collecting institutions to work with game publishers and marketplaces to develop lending affordances for digital-only games.
- There is a legitimate consumer market for post-OEM production runs of physical games.
- There is no official or standard pricing model known that separates library editions from consumer editions (as there is with eBooks, for example).
- Relationships with other library resources
- Physical game items, including board games and tabletop RPG materials, are held in Special Collections, alongside other-format versions of video game intellectual property, such as comics based on game franchises.
