I’m not sure who expected an online game to exist forever. Not the first time the lights have been shut off like this.
Everything needed to run the game online exists player side. There are many games where people run their own servers because of this, even in WoW. They are literally taking things to disable this ability from what they purchased.
And blizzard never supported people running private servers, and yet here they are so what’s the difference? I dont see why this game got so much more attention. Is it just pulling the game to sell the next one? Its scummy but its their right to pull their own product if they want to, and noone has to buy the new one.
They did, but that was 9 years ago, so you might not remember. However it was not as popular a movement yet, so they didn’t get the same backlash as people are getting almost 10 years later, when everyone is sick of this. You are right, they can pull their own product if they want to, now. The goal is to make it so they can’t just do that if they want to, anymore.
It’s also not some unknown black magic to make online games exist forever. We know how to do it.
What online games have existed forever without needing the community to reverse engineer it?
Quake is one of the oldest ones out there. Any game where you can host the server yourself can exist forever. It used to be very common that the server code was provided to you with your copy of the game.