What with all the layoffs across the games industry to compensate for rampant budgetary overspending in publishing, the reality behind keeping retro games within a paid walled garden is about charging new money for old rope and controlling the market to force gamers to play new games.
The specific quote is that “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes.”
This explains why people like Jim Ryan hate retro games. They think these older games would cannibalize sales from newer releases, which is uniquely stupid.
It's only stupid when it's only RETRO-RETRO games, like from the N64 backwards. Yeah I might spend some time on a retro game but they're usually very short and they're probably not gonna scratch the itch of a modern game, though for JRPGs that might not be the case.
But when we talk about from the ps2 onwards? Yeah sometimes I play one of the many many many 6th gen games instead of buying a recently released game at full price.
It's obvious that they just don't want to start the process of making old legally inaccessible game freely available, because then we could start with Retro games and then move forwards into games that DO bite into new game sales.
Either way emulation is always available, so I'm not losing sleep over this.