Because copyright holders like the idea of reselling the same games to you hundreds of times. Nintendo resells the exact same games to people every time they launch a console. Companies create low effort compilations all the time.
You'd think they'd make their money and move on to new creations. You make something, it's successful, you make your money for 5 years or so and then it's public domain. You'd have to make new stuff to make more money. No. Copyright holders feel entitled to extract value out of their "property" essentially forever. It's the ultimate in rent seeking.
The copyright issue is what sucks most. For the US the first implementation of copyright allowed max 28 years.
Since then the cycle to make/market/distribute/profit off a product has gotten much faster.
If anything, copyright should be shorter than 28 years. Not longer.
I love the original The Matrix(1999) movie. But it has had it's day in the sun, earned money and become "old news" at least 10 years ago.
In a "free market" sense, 12 years is a long time to have a monopoly on IP. If you have failed to make whatever money you are going to make of this IP by 12 years, then you are sucking at your marketing/use-of-IP and there should be "competition in the market" with your IP, to best make use of it.
If that's the motivation, it's pretty misguided, since it is a completely different motivation to buy. I buy (or pirate if I can't) the old games for nostalgia fun, not so much for the gameplay or graphics. I then also buy the new game for the modern experience & gameplay.
They want to have the option to resell you the exact same game emulated on the new systems too, see Wii Virtual Console I think it was called, and NES classic system, all of those.
Yes actually. You can still buy brand new copies of titles like Kingdom Hearts, FFXII and others for PS2 directly from Amazon.com and not a third party seller. For a while Square Enix was selling PS1 versions of FF games too although they have seemed to have stopped in the last few years.
