I feel like corporations don't understand the difference between archival and maintenance.

Okay maybe that's not the right words.

Basically take old roms and the original Doom for example: Nintendo keeps wanting to resell you Virtual Console ports of things, and Bethesda is trying to sell ports of Doom on consoles.

But the thing is, these games are old enough that 95% of the original developers aren't working at their respective companies at best, or the original companies don't exist at all and the trademark is owned by someone else now at worst.

The current distribution model holds the perspective of treating the games as a product to continue selling on the same level as actual new games, but that's the wrong way to go about it. This is what I mean about "maintenance", the corporations want to keep servicing you the product as if it's brand new, to keep profiting off of it.

(And maintain copyright.)

These games should be free. They should be presented as relics with the preface that the games might not work, or would require emulation efforts on the part of the user.

Archivists could work to assist in the accessibility of this with their own source ports and the like, and this work could be supported through donations.

While you could argue that's the intent of the corporate model - to provide accessible means to play old games with source ports - the fact is is that profit still remains a motive. Money is not going towards the devs of the game, while being framed as purchasing the game. Donating to archivists for their work isn't framed as buying a game, but supporting archival and maintenance.

This maintenance too allows archival to be essentially criminalised as copyright infringement. Frankly this is absurd for numerous reasons, but it may mostly stem from the fact the digital age has broken the concept of "theft".

Imagine if libraries were punished for having copies of books that publishers decided to resell in new editions for. Of course, this isn't strictly an appropriate comparison because physical books exist in a finite number. Data fundamentally doesn't work this way, copying data does not create any loss in the availability of that data.

Despite that no original devs may exist at the copyright holder, despite that copying these old games does not hurt the accessibility of those games, copyright infringement is treated as "theft" because certain higher ups want to keep control and maintenance of a product, because the industry can't comprehend that nothing is lost from letting someone else distribute some ancient software.

Hell the tech industry wants to make everything you own just rented in the form of subscription models, so they can keep an even tighter hold on things, but this post is long enough.