Most of the IP rights for those old abandoned games are split up between a bunch of random legal firms.

Makes it a nightmare to legally remaster or remake old games. Since a game’s copyright will be owned by Law Firm A, and the trademark will be owned by Law Firm B, and the art and music will be owned by Law Firm C, but then Law Firm B says they actually own some of that art and music as part of their trademark ownership, etc etc

That makes the situation easier for piracy/unofficial ROMs though, since lawyers aren’t going to do shit when they can’t even figure out who legally owns a game.

That is the point.

People can use their own cell data to watch meme videos instead of hogging all the network bandwidth and slowing down wifi speeds for all the students who are trying to get actual schoolwork done.

If we are counting video games as art, then there have been plenty of rich techies over the past 2 decades who have spent millions out of pocket trying to create their own version of “The Next World of Warcraft Plus Call of Duty Except Better”.

We don’t usually hear about video games funded and created by rich tech people though, because their game projects rarely make it to launch (due to the fact that video game development is actually much more challenging than it looks).