Considerinng the history of the PlayStation and the changes it went through as it was developed starting with the failed Nintendo partnership, then the failed discussions with Sega, I am surprised they were able to hit a home run like they did. It was not just money, which Sony had plenty of, it was a technical marvel. It didn't follow industry standards, what little there were at the time, they kind of marched to their own music. They did right by developers with easy to use, well easier than what Sega, 3DO, Atari, etc offered, software development kits and such.

I have talked with people that worked at game companies back in the 80s when storage was expensive. Kind of like the NASA situation with tapes and such. It was economical to reuse what they could so things were lost left and right. After all, in 1988 or so, no one was thinking that someday gamers will want ports of these games on newer hardware.

The fact that storage was so expensive is a big reason we no longer have source code for so many commercial games from the 80s. It was simply not in the budget. Even Nintendo went through this with many of their early titles. Everyone thinks Nintendo has always been flush with funds but back in 1982/1983 they were near bankruptcy, struggling to make rent for their U.S. location. If not for luck we would not have Nintendo today, gaming as a whole being different too.

Even more recently, there have been people that bought computers on eBay from defunct companies liquidation services and ended up with SDK units for PlayStation, Dreamcast, Xbox, etc. That is how we ended up getting access to the source code for many Dreamcast games that were thought to be lost because the developers went out of business before completing the games.