SPIEL ‘24 in Essen, the world's largest consumer goods fair for games, recently ended with 204,000 visitors. This proves the great and growing enthusiasm for analogue gaming culture. A current statistic (see attachment) shows in parallel that the borrowing of analogue games in public libraries doubled to more than five million loans per year in the period from 2020 to 2023. An impressive figure on yesterday's Library Day.

This increase underlines all the more that analogue games must be recognised and funded as media works in their own right, like books, for example. For ten years, the SAZ has been calling for analogue games to be included in the collection of the German National Library or for the recognition and funding of an equivalent institution. The aim is to ensure and finance the collection, documentation and preservation of analogue games, as well as to provide a basis for research, as would be appropriate for this cultural asset. Part of this process is the development of a corresponding database, which can then finally provide comprehensive data for the distribution of library royalties by VG WORT. So far, authors and game publishers have been largely left out in the cold due to a lack of data.

It is time that the statutory remuneration claims according to § 27 and § 63a of the German Copyright Act are finally fulfilled and that the corresponding project in the coalition agreement of the federal government is put into practice.

Link to the German press release with the detailed statistics