The only thing that prevents this from existing is the licensing nightmare of trying to track down who still owns the rights to those old ROMs. So many defunct companies and cases where even the people who worked on it have no idea who currently owns the rights.
Had we kept the 28 year copyright duration from 1831 almost all ROM images would be in the Public Domain now.
And some of the licensing conflicts are because of an alliance that existed and made sense in say 1995 and today seems like inexplicable nonsense.
For example indie creator studio makes video game for the PS1. It's a huge hit, they go on to make other popular games, and one day Microsoft buys them, morphs them into an in-house team. And then one day you realise you're arguing that, Microsoft (now the owner of the license) should release this Sony Playstation game. No. Not going to happen.
When this stuff happens for individual humans, often even if the money doesn't mean anything to one person who is an obstacle, it does mean something to their co-creators and they'll do it for that. For example it would be possible for Alan Moore to have blocked a lot of stuff that uses his work, from the V for Vendetta movie (which lots of people liked but I felt missed the whole point) to the re-issues of Miracleman, but while Alan doesn't care about money, the artists on that work do, and him blocking it would hurt them. So e.g. that's why modern copies of Moore's seminal run on Miracleman say they're by "The Original Author" in big text but never mention Moore by name, that's his condition, he doesn't want the Mouse's money, but his artists do.
Corporations don't care though. If they can inconvenience a modern competitor by snuffing out an important cultural artefact that is exactly what they'll do.
I'd actually advocate outright abolition of copyright. The associated moral rights have some place, but copyright is almost entirely a means for corporations to try to control culture for their own profit and we don't need it. But 28 years is a more acceptable middle ground I guess.
There should be a rule that if an IP was broadly commercialized at any point (eg. offered at a retail store) the owner can’t resist any abandonware offering unless he’s still offering the IP at RAND terms
That still protects the individual artists and perhaps the Banskys but doesn’t unnecessarily lock up these old games
It's difficult in some cases but demand is absolutely the main driver.
Much like Netflix, the reality is that people aren't actually very interested in old shows apart from a handful of super famous perennials which are already available anyway.
They say they are in surveys, but consumer behaviour does not back that up. They just use newer content in practice.
There is always interest in old shows, but not enough to deal with the licensing issues. You could have much wider libraries if the licensing was less of a nightmare.
Had we kept the 28 year copyright duration from 1831 almost all ROM images would be in the Public Domain now.