> the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers

Some lawyers are extremely litigious.

This might be daydreaming and wholly unreasonable, but I think that it should go like this: “As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.”

Can’t afford to patch the game for vulnerabilities in the code or host servers? That’s okay, the community will do that for you after they reverse engineer it.

But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.