[johnnyanmac]

Funny thing is server shutdowns are rarely as "planned" out as you'd imagine. Look at GameInformer as we speak. In less than 1 business day the staff was kicked out with no warning, its 20+ year old website taken down, and its twitter handle deleted, hours after making a goodbye statement. This was clearly not planned more than a month in advance by Gamestop. Planned Obscolecense implies (if not, is outright defined) as designing a product to fail in a specific amount of time. No game service worth its salt is designed to shut down in 6 months (you can probably find some chinese asset mills to prove me wrong. so take a charitable interpretation of "worth its salt")

[account42]

There may be premature shutdown but no buiness plans to run servers for free forever. Ongoing server costs will be part of the business plan from the start.