It's hardly news that the decision not to take money for an asset that wasn't making money and likely never would again is a bit of a mystery to many of us.
That isn't very mysterious to me, for two reasons. First, everyone assumes that there's no default answer when someone asks you to sell them something you own. Every time someone asks you that question, apparently, you're supposed to make a value judgment and decide in the direction that grants you the most value. That's not true, and should be (but apparently isn't) obviously not true. The default answer to all requests to sell someone something you own is "no." You have to make a positive decision to sell, and that decision is separate from the value proposition. It should not be a mystery that someone might simply decide not to want to sell, regardless of what was offered.
Second, in today's world there's no such thing as valueless intellectual property. Disney did not purchase Star Wars and Marvel Studios because of how much money they were making. But much more importantly, and what most people who don't analyze these decisions don't realize, is that Disney did not purchase Star Wars and Marvel Studios because of how much money they are *currently* making either.
Disney makes a lot of money on the Marvel movies, but if that's all Disney was going to get out of Marvel Studios it would not have bothered. Disney is not about making Marvel movies. Disney is about
controlling content rights. It is about Iron Man theme park rides and Captain America lunchboxes and ABC television spin offs, and everything else that goes along with that. In today's world, all content rights can potentially be valuable, and furthermore any content rights you cede to someone else can become competitive content.
The decision not to sell the game or transfer it while it was still functioning is more inexplicable. But the decision not to sell or license the property now that it is not attached to a functioning game is actually less inexplicable: there's a sizeable hurdle to overcome just to get someone to want to even think about it.