To expand on a comment downthread: preservation is piracy and piracy is preservation. Unfortunately this is unpopular with games publishers.
Traditional archive preservation relies on preserving the media. But for many games now there is no media, or it's optical disks which aren't going to last. In order to preserve it it has to be copied. The publishers have no interest in this and the rights may become mired in uncertainty when the publisher goes bankrupt.
Conversely, many things we only have copies of because copies were made illegally. Not just games but TV programmes as well (the notorious early Dr Who episodes for example).
And if we look at some of the other "big content" industries, they find it might not be in their interest to allow their old content to compete with current content for attention. Disney don't make all their films available on the market at the same time ("disney vault") for this reason.
Traditional archive preservation relies on preserving the media. But for many games now there is no media, or it's optical disks which aren't going to last. In order to preserve it it has to be copied. The publishers have no interest in this and the rights may become mired in uncertainty when the publisher goes bankrupt.
Conversely, many things we only have copies of because copies were made illegally. Not just games but TV programmes as well (the notorious early Dr Who episodes for example).
And if we look at some of the other "big content" industries, they find it might not be in their interest to allow their old content to compete with current content for attention. Disney don't make all their films available on the market at the same time ("disney vault") for this reason.