It is a problem that game development shares with other forms of mass-marketed art: film industry, tv, music... they are all pretty bad at conservation, and were downright atrocious until very recently (I’m sure you heard how the BBC lost the first few seasons of Dr Who — and they are an excellence for conservation in the field).

Simply put, the emphasis in creative industries is to continuously create (eh) new stuff, not revisiting the old. Couple that with inevitable financial pressures, add the cultural distortion of software development culture at large (where everything changes every year or so, and if you are not on the latest and greatest you are dead in the water) and you have a situation where conservation is the very last priority.