[rawbot]

It's irrelevant whether the costs are trivial. Once developers and publishers release the server binaries or API-spec, fans can invest as much time and money as they want to replicate it. They don't need to reverse-engineer it.

[chongli]

What happens if the game developer has licensed 3rd party tools and libraries which the server software depends on and they don’t have the right to include these?

[rawbot]

Those shouldn't be included, of course. If the server has them too tied up to be decoupled, then I guess someone needs to unscramble the spaghetti before serving it