This presentation provides an overview of the current state of the art, best practices, and emerging cross-sector initiatives linking the cultural heritage and creative industries. The success of the digital entertainment industry over recent decades has generated increased interest from the cultural heritage sector (Camuñas-García et al. 2023), with video games increasingly showcasing cultural heritage elements, such as visual art, folklore, and historical narratives (DaCosta 2024). The global success of Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science 2024), a game deeply rooted in Chinese heritage both in its visual design and narrative, has brought the topic into focus, also in light of its successful collaborations with the Culture and Tourism Department of Shanxi Province (Li 2024).

Within the cultural heritage field, policy frameworks such as the EU Declaration of Cooperation on Advancing Digitisation of Cultural Heritage advocate for the innovative use and spill-over in other sectors of digitised cultural heritage (EU Commission 2019). In parallel, a range of European initiatives—including Europeana, 5D Culture, EUreka3D, and 3D-4CH—support the digitisation of cultural heritage and its reuse beyond the heritage sector by providing capacity building, tools, and policies relevant to the creative industries, including the video game sector.

Building on this context, the presentation discusses recent outcomes from the EU Culture and Creative Sectors’ Future in the Multiannual Financial Framework 2028–2034, alongside forthcoming initiatives such as the Europeana Creative Industries Task Force, which aims to promote the reuse of public-domain digital heritage within the creative industries through activities including game jams (Europeana 2025).

Furthermore, by presenting international best practices from contexts including South Korea, China, the United States, and Italy, and by drawing on recent controversies—most notably the depiction of destructible shrines in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Ubisoft 2025), which prompted debate in the Japanese Diet (Yin-Poole 2025)—the presentation outlines key challenges in integrating cultural heritage into video games. These challanges include access to finance, legal and regulatory constraints, and competing objectives, particularly between stakeholders prioritising commercial profitability and those committed to heritage preservation (Klimas et al. 2025). The analysis also addresses the interplay among the rights of cultural heritage communities whose traditions or symbols are represented, the intellectual property rights of institutions, the public’s right of access to cultural heritage, and, finally, the creative autonomy of game developers.