It may be helpful to select one specific facet of ESA's argument and talk a bit about it. Here's an excerpt from their executive summary in http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2023/En...

EFF’s discussion of “matchmaking” services and multiplayer-modes
is also misguided. The video game industry utilizes access controls in order
to offer robust, interconnected online experiences that supplement game
play. These immersive gaming experiences leverage users’ Internet
connectivity to provide a suite of online network features to gamers. These features can include, for example, not only multiplayer game play, but also
chat communications, sharing of user-generated content, leaderboards,
points, badges and other achievement markers. Online network features for
sports games might update roster information in real time to reflect injuries,
trades or even increases or decreases in skill. And the online services may
enable users to download customized outfits or other downloadable content.
Some modern games, such as Minecraft, enable the user to create the very
world that the player, and others, inhabit.12 Still other games may use cloud
servers to offload core game calculations to create more realistic game
experiences.13 Significantly, however, all of these online network services
generally are entirely distinct services that the user must register for―and
sometimes pay for―separately and are not included in the purchase of the
video game. Consequently, contrary to EFF’s assertions, multiplayer
gameplay over the Internet is not a “core” functionality of the video game,
and permitting circumvention to access such functionality would provide the
user greater benefits than those bargained and paid for.

I think the only people who could believe what the ESA has written in that paragraph are people who don't actually play videogames or understand them at all. No one pays for a leaderboard feature, for example. As for Minecraft, the ability to create the world around you is inseparable from what people "pay for when they buy the game." In other words, it's not a separate feature, or some kind of upsell. It's the heart of the game.

The topic at hand is "Should it be lawful to revive a videogame after it has been abandoned?" That is, games which 1. no longer work and therefore cannot generate any revenue, and 2. can be made to work through reverse engineering the network protocols alone.

The last point is the key. The network protocols are all that need to be reverse engineered. In other words, if it's a PC game, it can be pointed to a fake gameserver which you write, which responds as the "real" gameserver would have. If it's a console game, it's no different. There is no reason a console has to be modified at all in order for people to be able to play an abandoned game, in multiplayer mode, unless maybe the ESA is suggesting the publisher pushed out some kind of "killswitch" patch which removed the multiplayer features of the game entirely via an update. However, such an eventuality can be sidestepped by the hackers by getting people to uninstall the game and then reinstall whatever came in the disc they bought, and then run a local proxy to block the update servers. It should be obvious at this point why no console modifications are necessary to make this work.

The executive summary doesn't seem thoughtful. It seems to be handwaving. It almost seems to be creating issues where none exist, as in the case of arguing that "the modifications extend far past the games themselves and into the consoles/phones/whatever, creating an ambiguity about whether/when jailbreaking limitations are contractually enforceable." What am I missing?

I wish to be persuaded. Why do you, as a gamer and a hacker, believe the ESA has a case?

EDIT: I tried to upvote your comment to cancel out your downvote, but you've attracted more than one. Strange.

HN is so adversarial nowadays that I've basically left. I hope that I managed to convey that my intent here is not to challenge your views, but rather to learn from them.