IMO the primary reason is the difficulty of supporting older titles across various modern systems, for a too small of an audience. If older games were so popular GOG would dominate the market by now.

They don't *need* to support shit, I would pay for the rom dumps if there was a way for me to do so. Same with music, I like buying music but relatively few artists let me give them money for flacs.

Also GOG does really well considering the tough competition.

Stand alone executable are very easy to support for ~20 years on the windows platform. It's only dos games that need to be packaged in VMs for modern platforms. Support only becomes a problem when there's invasive drm tied to a specific os or hardware platform or required online services that require ongoing maintenance.

There is absolutely no need for them to support any of this. They don't need to spend even one cent of their money on this stuff.

The world is literally filled with people who love these games so much they learned computer hardware and programming because of it. People who love these things to the point they'll reverse engineer the consoles and make emulators to make sure they are playable again long after the hardware has crumbled to dust. People who obsess about things like cycle accuracy and undocumented hardware behavior in order to make sure even the nonsensical bugs in the system are recreated because there were games out there relying on those things to do something awesome with limited resources. People who will reverse engineer the games themselves and make open source engines for the content. These people are beyond awesome, they literally do this because they enjoy it.

All these corporations have to do is get the hell out of these people's way, for they are doing god's work.

That's literally all they have to do. They just gotta shut up, stop whining about their "lost sales" and let these people do what they gotta do.

Yeah you’re probably right. Nevermind.