Quote Originally Posted by DELTAprime View Post
While there is the obvious cost of running or upgrading the hardware, it's nothing for a company like Activision Blizzard King which still has servers up for games like the original Modern Warfare and the original version of StarCraft. What a lot of people don't take into account is the tech support element. How many support emails is this old game generating? How often do I need to have my devs go and write new server code to fix an issue? Again, Activision Blizzard can afford all that so they really have zero defence. But for a small dev, it is relevant. It should be noted that Activision Blizzard and EA are the two worst offenders for shutting down old games' multiplayer servers. In EA's case, they want you to play the new version of your favourite game, rather than a two-year-old version so they can sell you new microtransactions. It's less clear what Activision's reason is, but given how much of a horrible, money-grubbing person the CEO Bobby Kotick is, it's likely just a profit thing.
Activision no longer even has the Transformers license so I don't know if the terms of their license would even let them keep the servers going (not that they would anyway, they're cheap so-and-so's). Or am I wrong on the license terminating server infrastructure deals?