I think you are completely correct, trying to hit homeruns instead of a lot of singles and doubles. I agree.
You would think again, that someone would fill the void then. That's how capitalism works.
I have a hard time imagining Capcom, Konami or SE saying no to a company that comes to them, says"we will handle all the costs, you just figure out a percent of revenue you need to let us do this."
Coming at this from a different angle, but with some crossover:
I do design and repro work for a very small outfit in the UK who reprint comic strips from the '70s and '80s. We deal with big publishers who have huge back catalogues of classic strips, but who have sold, lost, or destroyed the original films and art, and who are not in the business of re-releasing these stories but - apart from a handful of major titles - just sit on them.
We approach them, pay a licence fee on certain terms and then handle the repro (typically from high-quality scans of the comics themselves, rather than the original art) and printing, distribution etc. It's not particularly profitable or massively labour-intensive (though us working essentially for free does tip things there a little), but there is a niche that supports regular releases for a small market.
I see the majority of companies who own potential VC third-party titles in the same way as the couple of big rightsholders we deal with: they're not interested in pushing out this material themselves, as it's pretty low-margin and a small market, and if no-one is going to approach them to licence the games out and handle releases then it's never going to happen, and they'll just carry on sitting on a wealth of this stuff. Much as with our side of things, I suspect there are very few people outside these companies interested in taking on the risk (relatively small, but a risk nonetheless) of licensing and releasing VC games, particularly now that you're talking about a far, far smaller market in the Wii U userbase. You also have another wrinkle, in that pretty much every single potential VC candidate is available for free if you have a PC and a modicum of tech savvy (whereas in our position many of these strips are totally unavailable, or only available in very poor quality scans) and many of the people with the tech skills and/or business savvy are perhaps more interested in making their own games than licensing out another company's title for break-even or a small profit.
There are smaller IP holders/licensors that are absolutely open to that sort of deal but bigger companies like S-E, Konami, etc aren't going to do deals with nobodies, so unless you're an established business that already has personal relationships with people at these companies you're not gonna get anywhere.
The other immediate issue is that a lot of these companies decline every single offer with "thanks but no thanks, this is something we should handle ourselves" only to... not handle it, at all.
Ha! Yes, this is something I'm familiar with too
It's taken a while to build trust with companies we deal with, and we still deal with them on a case-by-case basis, rather than being able to license blocks of stuff. We've also had some knockbacks on potential strips because they have vague plans for future releases, and as part of the licence we typically return high-quality scans to them which they want to hold "just in case" they decide to release digital editions (which our licence terms prevent, natch). It's like dealing with an elderly relative who has a house packed full of stuff they never use, aren't particularly interested in and have no plans for, but refuses to sell or lend out
