Comment by kg

It's even a bad deal for the rightsholder. There are lots of stories in video games of how a studio or publisher lost the original source code or assets for a game, then 5, 10 or 20 years later they want to remaster it and they can't do so without jumping through really elaborate hoops involving binary recompilation, emulation, repainting assets from scratch, etc.

If the code and assets were escrowed, the rightsholder could just go claim that stuff whenever they need it.