Does anyone else find problematic how old licensed games (or games whose license has expired) cease to be available "forever"? For example: franchise games, licensed sports games, racing games with branded cars, etc...

Not only those with physical releases become hard or impossible to find, but the ones that had a digital-only release simply disappear forever.

It sucks indeed. I kick myself for not buying Battle for Middle Earth Anthology when it was available for €20.

Many of them will be stuck in limbo forever, especially games that were poorly received or sold poorly when they were originally released. I've always wanted GOG to publish the old Magic: The Gathering from MicroProse but it'll never happen for that reason.

As has pretty much happened with the recent Deadpool game.

Yeah, I don't understand why this is so difficult for games. I can go into a store and buy a DVD of the terrible XIII mini-series, but the game XIII had to be purged from sale everywhere. Hell, even the cheesy 90's Captain America movie made its way onto DVD and Blu-ray, but there's no chance we'll ever see some kind of re-release of the "Captain America and The Avengers"-beat 'em up from 1991.

If I were to guess, I'd say that it probably has to do with the general attitude of the video game industry. Before services like GOG came into existence, major publishers like EA had absolutely no interest in making their old games available again, because they refused to believe that there was any worth or profit in that. The majority of these publishers seem to have absolutely no regard for the preservation or possible longevity of their own works. They just throw releases onto the market as momentary distractions for the masses and move on.
You can also see this in their attitude towards backwards-compatibility, in which Yahtzee Croshaw sees the creation of "an industry without long-term memory" that is doomed to repeat the same idiotic mistakes over and over again.

Lets see, I have four bucks on me. We could start a pot and go get some of these bad boys out of limbo.

Four Bucks,your Rich...
I can tip in 1 cent AUD...

I believe it's more about the licensing deals themselves and the company who owns the license/IP.

This is one of the big problems with digital distribution and honestly copyright law in general.

Of course, I meant that these deals don't seem to be made for any kind of longevity in the first place. I suppose that it might be similar to how the music licensing for quite a 80's TV shows was handled back in the day: The companies behind series like Miami Vice licensed a lot of popular music, but to save money, they got them for TV broadcasting only. Thus, when the demand for home video releases of TV episodes arose, most or all of those songs got replaced by sound-alikes because the studios didn't want to pay the extra costs.

Oh, I agree. I assume that in most cases, the IP holder's logic is to prevent internal conflict with the brand, as in, they don't want the old product to affect the sales of the new product.

Wasn't it Ubisoft who re-sold the SNES TMNT game when they temporarily got the rights for the franchise back in 2006/2007? Of course, once they lost the license, all the games they made ceased to be available.