If you look into the history of modern MMOs, 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 MMO 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 servers and minimal support staff, there is no real reason to take a MMO offline. In fact, most game publishers realize that shuttering a MMO is a little bit of a public relations nightmare. It's much better to keep a game running as long as there are any players willing to pay for it.

This doesn't seem to apply in cases where a publisher is worried about a MMO negatively affecting the reputation of another product or license. One particular example of this was The Sims Online, which had been slowly losing subscribers since its launch in 2002. How EA managed to make an under-performing MMO 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 MMO from the Sims brand name since they canceled it a few weeks later.