I personally don't care about Hobbits, but good for fans of the world once it enters public domain. I enjoyed Hades though, which exactly is based on public domain stories. And it is great. That is the thing: pieces of art can build on each other.

OK, because I don’t think we’d have a disagreement. Under the model I feel would be ideal, if you create a chair, you can do with it whatever you want. Make a YouTube video and say “I created the best fucking chair in the world, and now I’m burning it, motherfuckers!” And have fun. That’s your right. Same with a manuscript you’ve written, or a painting you’ve painted.

What I’m talking about is relationship between creators, publishers, and audience. Or manufacturers if we’re talking about chairs. Particularly, the limitations on the rights of the publisher/manufacturer to destroy another person’s work. The manufacturer’s job is the manufacturing and reproduction of the chair. They’d have the responsibility to preserve the blueprints you sold them for manufacturing purposes, and a master copy of the chair (which doubles as the asset file repository for a game). They wouldn’t have the right to destroy your creation without your consent - that goes beyond the scope of the manufacturer’s contract. But they would have the right to sell the manufacturing rights to another party, and that party would be acquiring all the responsibility.

Since you, as the creator sold the rights of reproduction, you’d no longer have the rights yourself for reproduction - so you can’t authorize others to reproduce it without the consent of the manufacturer. If the manufacturer wishes to destroy copies of the chair and its blueprints, they must first seek your approval to destroy your creation. You didn’t sell them the rights to eliminate your work, you sold them the rights to reproduce and distribute. If they ask about the destruction, you could say “Sure, but this chair means a lot to be, 25 million dollars or get the fuck off my property.” But, otherwise, if the manufacturer abandons the reproduction of the chair (perhaps by their choice, or when a certain timeframe of inaction expires) and hasn’t received the consent of the creator to destroy it, then they must turn it over to the public.

In short:
Creator = rights to destroy the chair and its blueprints.
Manufacturer = rights to reproduce the chair, but must maintain a master copy and copies of the blueprints.
Abandonment = rights of reproduction and blueprints transfer to the public domain.
Public = May reproduce the chair if it is public domain. May not reproduce the chair if not public domain, and not authorized.

The bolded is about the only part I will disagree with.  Far more often I hear about "game preservation" from pirates trying to justify their actions.

We will have to agree to disagree.  I believe in ownership.  If I create something I own it and I can pass it to my kids.  Nobody has the right to demand I turn my creation over regardless of the reason.  But to each their own.

And this next comment is not directed at you but a general comment...  I would wager a great many people here don't mean preservation as in the games are locked in a vault for historical archives...  what they really mean is games online for free that they can download/emulate.  Just my 2 cents, but I'm not buying the cover story from most in this thread.  Again, not directed at you.  

Just want to reinforce this very good point.  Nintendo might be the best there is at preserving old games.  Doesn't mean they have the rights to make them available though.

https://www.nintendo.destructoid.com/nintendo-might-have-code-or-rom-for-every-game-made-on-all-its-consoles/

Well first, the libertarian view that even immaterial things are owned by someone is not how the world runs. Governments put all sort of limits on ownership, be it of material or immaterial stuff. That is the first ot accept here, that governments can and actually do put limits on it. Now in the concrete, the archival rules as I said already apply to other media. Now games have some specialties that have to be cleared, as they are interactive software, but overall there is no general hindrance to a similar archival. So it is not unreasonable if the state demand such archival duties and it also wouldn't equal a disappropriation.

Now to the second part: you assume many people mean something else with preservation than preservation? Well, it may be your assumption, but nobody here in this thread actually demanded that pirate copies become legal or stuff like that, did they? So applying some stance you assume to argue against some other stance is not helping your case. As I said, archival is done for other media and that isn't the source of piracy.

I'm also software engineer (more a data scientist lately)

Computer science would be nowhere near where it is if everybody build their own software and just passed to their kids 

This thread made me have the great perception of how good is to not live in a libertarian world. Most of our cultural and scientific production wouldn't exist if ownership was restricted to individuals instead of public domain 

Sakaguchi must've lit a match before he 'voluntarily' left Square. "You ain't having my work, bitchees!"

And this shows that it also can be very much in their own interest if the developers/publishers would preserve their code more and better.