I think they’d be better served open sourcing the CLI and selling a license to the GUI they’re writing. I’d love to hack this out in a linux terminal and if it’s any good, I’d happily buy a license for me and my less technical friends.
Because having games designed to run on legacy platforms is simply amazing. Check out what some devs have been developing for the Mega Drive, it’s absolutely mind blowing to see people pushing the hardware limits almost 40 years later.
Agreed with Magician and RmDebArc, and besides that, it could also be for the challenge, for the enjoyment, or because the vision of the dev only works in such a platform. And with emulators that allow commercial use around, the developer can also publish his games to modern platforms without having to rebuild the whole game.