Unreleased Media shouldn't be counted as Lost Media

And yet it often is when I watch YouTube videos about Lost Media.

When you describe someone as being lost in the woods it's because that missing person is known to have gone into the woods thus it might be possible to find them there, maybe they aren't there anymore but they could be.  But if a person never left the house but was simply killed and buried in the basement, you're not gonna find them in the woods.

I'm interested in Lost Media largely as a subgenre of my more general interest in obscure media that has been influential in-spite of it's obscurity.  The idea that some piece of lost media could have had at least a subconscious influence on someone who saw it before it was lost that went on to make some influential art of their own thus making that piece of lost media perhaps the missing piece of the puzzle of the history of some popular Trope is part of why the subject fascinates me.  With never released to begin with Media we know that didn't happen, it was seen only by the very people involved in making it, and whatever influence an unfinished project of theirs had on their future work is probably already well documented.

Unreleased Media absolutely can be a fascinating subject on it's own, but it's a different animal from why Lost Media is so enigmatic.

So for example as an Anime Fan if Go For A Punch aka Saki Sonobashi was real, it fascinates me not just for how it could have been a neat creepy little OVA on it's own but also for how it could have had a forgotten impact on future horror Japanese Horror Media like Moon or Euphoria.