I've worked at a few small studios that have shut down games with ~200 CCU peak because the cost/benefit of maintaining the ops for these games was not worth it.

> Another alternative would be spinning off the project: Meta letting it go and allowing team members to leave, take over the rights for a nominal fee of $10,000, and maintain it.

In my experience, studios have a contradictory FOMO mindset of letting other people run the game:

* If someone else makes money off it, they want to be part of it

* At the same time, they don't want to run it themself

* It's not worth the effort to open source it, also see argument #1

What usually ends up happening is the community reverse engineers the protocol and writes their own OSS backend.

Shameless plug: I founded Rivet (W23, https://rivet.gg) to simplify multiplayer game server ops. We talk to a lot of studios with hard-to-manage old games (i.e. 3+ years old can be ancient in gaming). We often help studios move these to our standardized ops so they don't have to worry about it anymore. We also help lower the server cost for old games by auto-scaling their servers based on player demand.