Yeah. Reading your comment, I remembered a similar one from the guys at GOG. He said that many people's eyes turn to dollars the moment they hear about the game's copyright, but then they hear the amount and most brush it off, saying, "Pay upfront." A few insisted on keeping the rights, but no one made them a better offer than GOG.
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I saw so much greed from people over rights to a game that only appeared once on a computer released in 1979, sold less than a few hundred copies. They acted like they were sitting on the long lost Ark of the Covenant. It was sad to see that happen. Worse when the games were more popular, yet still unknown to the rights holder who was just as clueless about it as they were before being told they owned it.
The random person in the middle of nowhere was worse to deal with than companies like Sony or even Nintendo (who were both MUCH easier to deal with).
Further, some would hound me to help them offload it to the highest bidder but then scoffed at my 10% fee saying I was a dirtbag and such, trying to take money from helpless people. WTF. Lol.
I stopped after that became the norm. It was pointless in my eyes. Hundreds of hours of research and work came up pointless and wasted so I moved to things that were better suited to my time and life.
Best of luck to anyone that is attempting to revive classic properties. It is a thankless job and it is harder than people think.
On the one hand, this doesn't surprise me, as many of us dream of creating something that will provide them with passive income and at least some relief from the household budget. On the other hand, it's as you say – we're usually talking about low- to moderately popular games, which in the overwhelming majority of cases won't generate a profit.
I don't have practical experience, so I can't comment on large companies and asking them to share code, etc., but I've heard from CDPRed and Polish game developers that large companies generally don't give a damn about old games. In fact, sometimes they even deliberately sell them for pennies to test the waters to see if it's worth investing in. Regarding paragraph 3, I also read this on the GOG forum. Many games can't be ported to new hardware, or it's very difficult to port due to various archaic features. Or "workarounds to code limitations" that no one but a single old developer knows how to solve.
That part at the end of your comment, "...that no one but a single old developer knows how to solve." resonates with me on one of my favorite game franchises from the 80s. Alternate Reality. It was planned to be a 7 or 9 game franchise, all interlocking with The City but only The City and The Dungeon ever got released.
From my research to find the rights holder to that series, which came up a dead end, I did learn from talking with people that worked on the ports to various computers that the original developer kept a lot of details behind the scenes (there are over 10 stats that are not even visible to the player for instance).
To port the game one would need to know the details that only the original developer knew and as far as I know, they are long forgotten at this point as the games were programmed during a period of strong use of post it notes around the monitor. Details that are simply no longer available.
There are many classic games, especially on computers, that are like this which complicates porting even more once an owner is found.
I've heard stories like those sticky notes. People had a somewhat similar problem with Half-Life, with a single mechanic, but they managed to eliminate it from the equation and glue two pieces of code together. From what I've heard, this was a fairly common practice. Especially since programmers like Gabe Nevell and John Carmack often sat after work hours and tested every solution they could think of. Did something work? Did the tests confirm it? Then we write the solution down on a piece of paper... Or maybe not, and then think in that jumble of code about what the author meant :D.
Oh yes, porting games from archaic platforms is a problem. Besides, some PS1 games were difficult to port due to their technological limitations. I don't remember the details, but some/many PS1 games had some graphical limitations.