If you look into the history of modern MMORPGs, you will notice that most games in the genre are still up and running. In over ten years only a handful have failed and been taken offline by their publishers. That's not to say every MMORPG has had outstanding success. It's just that the minimum cost to keep these game worlds running is actually quite small. As long as current subscriptions can maintain the worlds and minimal support team, there is no real factorto take a MMORPG offline. In fact, most game publishers realize that shuttering a MMORPG is a little bit of a public relations nightmare. It's much better to keep a game running as long as there are any gamers willing to pay for it.

This doesn't seem to apply in cases where a publisher is worried about a MMORPG negatively affecting the reputation of another product or license. One meticulous example of this was The Sims Online, which had been slowly losing subscribers since its commence in 2002. How EA managed to make an under-performing MMORPG out of one of the bestselling video game franchises in history, I will never know. EA eventually attempted to revive the game by renaming it to EA-land earlier this year. However, it seemed that the renaming was just an attempt to dissociate the MMORPG from the Sims brand name since they canceled it a few weeks later.