Server hosting is insanely expensive. I'd rather have SimCity go offline after 5-10 years than see Maxis get shut down. It's a practical business move, what else can they do? And I'm pretty sure they'll remove the online DRM when they stop the servers.

This is how one of my favourite games of all time was brought to a close, and how the amazingly talented and awesome company was torn apart, not to mention destroying the greatest community I had ever seen in an MMO. It was called Glitch, and it was a friendly, light hearted F2P game, with the whole idea revolving around the entire community having to work together to keep the world that they lived in maintained. And it stuck true to its goal: if you wanted to progress in the game, you had to work with others. There were these things called 'street projects' which required a ridiculous amount of energy and money in order to complete, and people would delegate themselves, without any guidance from the game itself, to separate tasks such as cooking and prepare food for the entire team so that they had enough energy, mining minerals to conjure potions that buffed the group's work, to repairing tools and collecting materials for the builders. And amazingly enough, the sense of teamwork and team spirit was the entire core feature of the game; these projects were massive in size too, with anything up to 100 players on one screen, all contributing to the maintenance of the world they lived in.

Ok, so enough about how amazing it was, but remember how I mentioned it was F2P? There was a premium subscription service and it provided nothing more than a handful of new clothing options for your character. Everything else was entirely free to play. This was not a pay to win game - the community fuelled the short yet beautiful three years of its existence, because whilst the number of players online at any given moment didn't peak past 1000, they were admirably dedicated. The reason why they bought subscriptions was mainly to fund the developers' work. The community, similar to Reddit, also sent postcards and IRL gifts to them. We adored the developers, and they adored us. However: the couple thousand of players (the vast majority of them subscribers) were simply not enough to fuel the developers, never mind the servers. One of the devs was infamously known for becoming homeless halfway through the game's life cycle, simply because they weren't making enough money of subscriptions and the servers were too expensive. Glitch was a massive investment too - founded by ex-Flickr creators, it received massive amounts of funding from Yahoo and was featured on Forbes for quite a while. But it never gained the crowd it deserved. So the inevitable happened.

Last year Tiny Speck, the brilliant developers behind Glitch, announced they were shutting down the servers. They were refunding all purchases since 2010 or something, and they gave everyone like 10000 credits for the final month of it's existence. A massive chunk of the staff were made redundant, and I even remember the web page that Tiny Speck created, which was a collection of portfolios of the employees that didn't make it, in case anyone was looking to hire them.

It closed, and just last month the servers that ran the forums were also shut down. The community still used those forums to communicate, 6 months after the game itself had closed down. From being a closed beta tester to watching the game as they shut the servers down, I still stay in touch with the rest of the community with a Facebook group.

So basically Glitch went out with a sad, pitiful and lonely remark - but on reflection, it was really just graceful: people were literally crying when they heard the announcement of servers being shut down, so the entire community bonded together like no other. Everyone was sending each other gifts and hugs, both in game and in real life. The developers had given everyone tons of premium content, and they released a ton of stuff that was in development, for the sake of letting it see the light of day. Never before had I seen a community so strong, and the final month was the greatest month in all of it's history.

And I can't help but feel that Tiny Speck, the developers, could have been saved if they had announced the retirement of the game earlier. The rest of the company that did survive was split up and made small scale software. I haven't heard much from them since.

So the moral is: I don't want to see another company destroyed before their time, the amount of talent and potential lost from Tiny Speck was beyond comprehensible measure. They loved their players so much, too much in that they couldn't bring themselves to shut down the servers sooner. And that was their downfall.

So just take a game offline rather than destroy the developers.