Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I'll say up front, you're right to say I don't have 15 years of experience to back this up. And if your takeaway is, "this idiot doesn't know what they're talking about", fine, I'll take that. That's a completely reasonable reaction. But, you're wrong. The top rated post on Hackernews right now is a bunch of people gushing about how cool it is to see the source code for the Apple II LOGO language[0]. Your code has…
I read all that and still think, "you don't what you're talking about". This is 100% a problem of dependency management, i.e. a problem common to software everywhere at all times that has never gone away. Whether more work survives is ultimately a factor of whether it's whether it's easy to make it survive, not on the "blame them for lacking effort" angle. Some folks will take the extra time, some won't. The software…
Everything you're talking about is a legitimate problem. I agree with you completely. However, source access helps with the majority of it -- even with making better emulators.
But even disregarding source code entirely, the game industry is also not particularly great at preserving final releases. If you're a big, popular title, sure, that'll probably be available. If you're a smaller title, or you saw a limited regional release, or you're a demo for an unreleased game, it's not a given in our industry that you actually do end up in vault somewhere. And that's the first step -- you can't run a game in an emulator unless you have the game to run.
The easiest question is, "do Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have an official archive where they preserve the release binaries of every single game that is released on any of their platforms?" The second easiest question is, "how about source code?" And then after that things start to get complicated and all of the concerns you're talking about come into focus.
In the film industry, there are cross-studio efforts to make sure that raw footage isn't lost. That's the result of prominent directors and studios taking the industry to task for many years, often after they had been personally bitten by film degradation. Nothing like that exists in the games industry. On the contrary, if you read over the comments on this article, you'll find multiple instances of devs arguing that preserving history is less important than shipping the next title, a kind of weird throwback to the same philosophy that led to old film studios destroying film reels from unsuccessful movies so they could be reused on the next project.
Of course, that's not a problem with Crash. It is, luckily, famous, so lots of copies exist. But apparently very few of the raw assets do. And it seems to me that if Sony can't even solve that problem, when Sony seems to have a clear financial incentive to solve it, they're not really in much of a position to start tackling MMO community preservation yet.