i genuinely mourn games that get shut down even if i barely played them
there's something uniquely gutting about logging into a game you used to love and seeing a countdown timer where the servers used to be. or worse, finding out it already shut down and you missed the whole thing.
what gets me is the money people poured into these games. not just cash but actual time, actual friendships built inside them, characters they spent months on. and then one day a studio decides the numbers don't work anymore and everything just... disappears. no archive, no offline mode, nothing.
i've started paying way more attention to whether a game has an endgame plan before i invest in it. fool me once with a live service that ran for two years and vanished, you know? the worst part is some of these games weren't even bad. they just couldn't sustain the model forever and nobody warned the players until it was too late.
does the live service graveyard problem make you more cautious about what you invest in now or do you just accept it as part of how gaming works?