A company is never going to agree to keep an online game running for any time, much less for all eternity. It just doesn't work in most cases because you have to pay costs to maintain and update the product.

And that's why some (and I hope a lot) of people have issue with online DRM, online-only, microtransactions, and the fact companies argue you did not buy the game but the license to the game. I'm assuming you are on the younger side of things because these things have been getting progressively worse over the past 15 years.

Do you think the one-time fee you paid would be sufficient to legally obligate a company to keep their servers running indefinitely, until the end of time? How would that work financially for the company? There's an argument to be made that you should indefinitely own any single-player game you purchase (and that those shouldn't be online-only), but that doesn't really work for multiplayer games.

@NotThatGuy I'd have liked to see the game's publishers release a run-your-own-server build (ideally, as open-source), so the game and its community can live-on without costing the publisher anything. Right now the best we can hope-for is a clean-room reimplementation and a covenant-not-to-sue (see: OpenRA).

@Dai Why would they release a competitor to their own product from which they make no money?

@AzorAhai-him- Plenty of reasons, though too much to go into in a comment thread. id Software and other games companies already regularly release their engines as open-source, for example.

@MarkRogers : of course no one would expect it to be run for all eternity. But if it was available for purchase shortly before it was shut down, then those who bought it recently paid money for nothing. And even those who bought it before, got a very limited time out of it. I hope customer protection laws will be updated to force companies to keep the servers online for a minimum of x years after the last sale.

@NotThatGuy Of course not, but the ingame transactions gives money to the company and could be used for server maintenance.

@Itération122442 Is it guaranteed that ingame transactions would outweigh the cost of server maintenance (even as the game becomes less and less popular as time passes)? What about games that don't have ingame transactions?

Blizzard is a Dutch company, at least the entity with which you have a legal relation. Makes things a lot easier; it's clearly subject to EU law.

Gee, I wonder if Activision-Blizzard, a multibilllion-dollar company with an arsenal of lawyers at their disposal, thought about whether this is legal to do before doing it. Really an incredibly pertinent question that obviously cannot have been considered by their legal team and can obviously only be answered by this site. /s

@IanKemp Multibillion dollar companies do illegal things all the time? If they can get away with it, or the cost and chance of being caught is lower than the cost of compliance, it is even profit-maximizing to do so.

Youtuber Ross Scott has an entire video about this very topic: "Games as a service" is fraud.. And here is lawyer's (Lior Leser) reply to that video: Games as a Service is Fraud? A Lawyer's Response.

If you are interested in games without this property, consider supporting your local open source game developer.

@preferred_anon will definitively have a look (and code for them is possible :) )

@Yakk "Multibillion dollar companies do illegal things all the time" is an association fallacy, not an argument. My point stands.

@IanKemp You didn't make a point. You alluded to the multi-billion dollar value of the company and implied it means their action wasn't illegal. I mean, you could read it as having a point that is irrelevant to the issue under discussion (THEY know if they did something illegal, which... doesn't matter?), but insofar as it applies to this question, there isn't any point to stand on. I'm pointing out, quite validly, that it being a multi-billion dollar company does not generate good evidence the act was legal, not claiming the act was illegal. So, no fallacy.

@IanKemp I'm unclear as to why you posted a sarcastic comment which seems to disparage the OP for asking a perfectly reasonable question. While your supposition that a multibillion-dollar company almost definitely reviewed the legalities of shutting down their server, this should not be construed as a definitive answer that what they did was actually legal.

@IanKemp Furthermore, the notion that a large company wouldn't do potentially legally dicey things because it's cheaper is absolutely something that has happened as demonstrated by the Ford Pinto (and frankly probably most cars).