Lots of those abandonware games are open now. Atari released source code to some classics publicly years back. And they still show up as paid games on devices occasionally because public domain open source is like that. When you say nobody cares you act like there are these starving video game artists who would be able to afford bread if only WE cared a little bit and bought the games. Bought them where? And to play on what? Most of us reading and interested in this are of the age who not only cared but already bought the games. We paid their salary with first-run purchases and pumping in the quarters. Then the systems eventually stopped working and we no longer had options because we were just dumb average consumers we couldn't rebuild our systems. But we paid a lot of salaries back in the day didn't we? A lot of old games were homebrew but the vast majority of games that people know of were through publishers. The devs made money out of the gate as employees or through publisher contracts. Publishers survived a while, or didn't, merged, squandered, were bought etc etc. After everything now, how much do the creators stand to gain if the games can't be played? Even somebody with the biggest heart isn't gonna "care" about a dissolved publisher of a game, when nobody on staff at the new name corp even had anything to do with the game back then.

Yeah there's money in nostalgia but it doesn't go to creators. Even if suddenly a movie was made about some classic game, it's not like suddenly the game creators are gonna get a massive revival of players or royalties. Most of them have no contract to earn royalties. Not our fault. The game would have to be re-released on a new platform, recoded, made better and you'd be looking at the new developers making the money on appstore sales. Most people in the tech community know how broken copyright and patents are. And when a system is broken (like how copyright and patents mostly don't encourage advancement or creativity. Especially if nobody pops up with legitimate claims on works. Now if somebody's grandson does a reddit AMA about grandpa who designed and developed River Raid and is down on his luck, that's hustle and that's gonna be people reaching out to that person because they want to, not because they are owed back royalties.

An original game developer now is better off kickstarting plans to buy the IP back whatever 10th company owns it now, and selling logo licensing through Hot Topic. Old games are historically interesting and valuable but no longer for the masses who spend money. I can buy a game on steam any winter or summer that had 100 devs working for 3 years to finish it paying less than what I paid for Atari cartridges back in the day. And that game may last me 30 hours of play.

If anyone deserves to make any remaining profit off the games, it's the original designers and devs. But they're gonna have to hustle like everyone else in the entertainment biz to make money off their work. Find a way into the comic cons as speakers or autograph signings, start new companies, reach out to old fans, find new fans. The magic here, the things us classic players care about is that the games play. And archive.org made that happen. If anyone's helping these old devs, it's archive.org. because you need an emulator to play them. If they become popular again, people standing in line, I think the game devs if they did stand to profit from revival might consider paying a percentage the tireless emulator developers for breathing new life into their work.