Yes.
Even if you're the owner of the game, the contracts for the voice actors, motion capture, models, etc. frequently define very narrow terms of usage. Defining the exact release platforms is common. Not to mention profit sharing if the actors or studios you're hiring are popular.
It's even worse for retro games. Many times the original rights holder went out of business, sold their rights, died, or something else that muddies the ownership chain.
Including the one my username is inspired by. It's why you see a lot of fan remakes. Another sad side effect of corporate owned IP is also a lot of times the individuals who did the bulk of the work on something can't be the ones to do a remake. They don't own their own work. A company owns it. That's what most of us sign up for to get a paycheck. But when it's something like film or games, the effect on artists or designers can be pretty depressing.
So yes, games are not unique in this way. I am hopeful in the optimistic future case where LLMs lead to lower barriers to entry, UBI, and so forth that copyright essentially disappears, or at the very least is severely reformed.
Many things should simply enter the public domain at a far more accelerated rate.
1) Rights can't be held by corporations, only individuals. So the rights to a piece of art or IP would always trace down to a list of names.
2) Everything enters the public domain after 20 years or the death of the entire list of ownership.
Since I'm just pitching wild ideas on the Internet of course I have the freedom to make any suggestion I want, but I would like to live in a world where (a) no companies or rights owners are able to play bullshit games with gating access to art that can be reproduced at trivial cost and (b) we can consume all the art we want that's past its sell-by date. It's insane to me that we don't have free, legal databases of every work of art created before, say, 2006.
Isn't the current system setup around the idea that the company gets the rights, and in return the workers get a basically risk-free salary? Wouldn’t your proposal undo that, so then workers took on the risk of whether they got paid, based on whether the game ends up being profitable?
Nightdive studios has a few blog posts regarding this.
The problem apparently is that a lot of retro game IP changed hands when records were physical.
So Nightdive goes to Company A and says "Hey do you have the rights to <Game> or did you sell them"?
Company A says "You can pay us 50,000 dollars to check our records we are not sure."
Nightdive says "Ok, seeing as you dont know if you own the game, could you give us permission just in case you do"
Company A: "No, we would need to review the records. However if you released the game to market, we would check just to see if we can sue"
Nightdive has an identical conversation with Company B, who may have bought the rights from Company A but only have archival records.
Nightdive walks away from the project.