Whenever one group tries to compel or coerce another group to do something that doesn't benefit them, you get minimal compliance at best and malicious compliance at worst. This doesn't really serve the interests of the coercing group - they don't really get what they want, and the other group often does whatever it legally can to make sure the first group never gets what it wants. Nobody wants that.

Instead, I think the groups involved need to figure out how to align everyone's incentives such that everybody involved wins. Right now, the publishers and rights holders gain no benefit from preserving games publicly. Forcing them to release post-sunset games to the public saddles them with the all the costs of doing this (engineering and QA primarily) and no benefit to them. If all they get out of this is added costs, of course they'll have every reason to minimize those costs.

One solution think both players and publishers should lobby the government for is some kind of tax incentive to offset the costs of making a "functionally playable" post-sunset game available along with stringent IP protections for the publisher and rights holders (e.g. a separate EULA for post-sunset releases to clear the publisher of any liability and protect any IP), and some sort of limited license agreement that protects any third-party licensor with their licensed work in use. This should preserve the majority of what players want (a functional game), provide financial incentive for the publishers to eat the post-sunset cost, and allow all IP owners to protect their property at the same time. In this regards, everybody gets something valuable they want out of the deal, rather than trying to force one party to do something with no visible benefit to itself.

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