I read the link. We don't even know what this means for game preservation yet. It doesn't guarantee that older games will become readily available for customers. For all we know, it could just mean that PlayStation will do a better job at preserving old code.

We don't even know what it is yet. Chill. Ted Turner's idea of preserving old films was bad colorization. George Lucas' idea of preservation was changing the originals. WWE's idea of preservation is editing out content they don't like. Sony has already been shown to be censoring Japanese games. For all, we know this will be streaming-only (which would make the concept of preservation laughable) and makes changes to games.

Game preservation seems like such an odd thing to care about.

Keeping media around in order to understand history better, for game design purposes, for the sake of knowledge alone, is a worthy cause.

Just talk to any fan of oldschool films. Apparently, of the thousands of early silent films released by major studios, about 75% are completely lost, and another 11% only exist with compromised quality. That means maybe 1 film in 7 from that era is left intact for future generations to enjoy. And from the early era of sound films from the mid-20's to 1950, about half of theatrical films released in the USA are lost.

In the world of music, we have no records of Mozrt's Cello Concerto in F or Trumpt Conerto, Beethoven's original version of Ode to Joy, and various pieces by Bach.

And according to the Lost Media wiki, there are over 670 Lost video games. Sure, a lot of these are unreleased prototypes or whatever. But a lot of lost or seemingly lost games were fairly complete projects of some quality, or at least are important for historical reasons (Legend of Zelda on Satellaview, Radical Dreamers, Resident Evil for the Game Boy Color, Sonic X-treme, various early mobile games, etc).

Stuff like all the original Dr Who episodes are lost forever due to a fire. Didn't have copies. I love playing old games but many of these great games never been ported to modern systems and these 80s and 90s consoles are aging. Less and less of them out there. Some systems are still difficult to emulate properly.

You're mixing up preservation with distribution. Nintendo preserves their games. That's how they were able to release an almost 30 year old incomplete game by the name of starfox 2. 

Nintendo is probably one of the best at preserving their old code, actually. They just don't distribute that code to the masses. In fact, rumor has it, they have the source code and/or a final ROM for every game that has ever released on any of their consoles.

Nintendo might have a widescale preservation effort, given that they released Star Fox 2 and an international release of Mother both in the 2010s.

The problem is that Nintendo has so many of their games in a vault it seems and is too stubborn to release them. With the impending closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops, we'll only have NSO Online versions of NES, SNES, and N64 games. And they are not exhaustive collections, especially the N64. GB and GBA games are heavily rumored, and I hope it's true. And it's past time for GameCube software re-releases. That should've happened in the early days of the Wii U, and we're nearly a decade past then.

Good point. A lot of Japanese developers in the 90s didn't preserve their games. They would delete them to make room for new games.  SEGA was one of these developers, they no longer have the code for Panzer Dragoon Saga for example. Capcom threw out the code to Okami and Ready at Dawn has to basically recreate the game. Every version of Okami played on modern platforms is the RoD recronstuction version of the game. I am only guessing here but that maybe why every Sonic Advenure port is based on the very different Gamecube version. It made a lot of changes. I think Falcom almost did a few years ago until fans made a huge fuss.

A bit late to the party. The community already did this decades ago.
The only thing of additional value would be the preservation of the source code and assets so that they can be recompiled or remastered for newer platforms. But that has nothing to do with game preservation, it is more like game restoration.

I'm not sure how I'm going to sleep at night knowing I can't watch a random silent movie nor can I play satellite zelda.  

I guess I'll have to play elden, triangle and forbidden west.  Kind of sucks.  I bet satellite zelda was something.

Joking aside, I love how gamers feel they are entitled part owners of IP who should have a say on what developers do or don't do.