Many of us only view a game’s release in passing, and view it as an “event”. Groundhog Smasher came out, it failed, and we don’t hear of it again. Additionally, many of us associate “online” games with being “live service” - expecting the developers to announce a new skin, battle pass, game mechanic, or character every other week.
But some online games are just purely enjoyable, or get enough unremarkable patches, or sometimes don’t even need a high playercount, to be enjoyed for years after the developers stopped emitting news.
This subject also gets confusing with cross-play games; even if one game has hardly anyone in its Steam playercount, sometimes between Playstation and Xbox there’s just enough left to garner a following.
Which games do you play, or know about, that most people would’ve thought to be completely closed down, or at least had totally forgotten about?
Quake 3 and Unreal tournament both released before the year 2000 and still have an active community
I’m pretty sure you can still find people playing Doom deathmatch online, although these days it might be more limited to various events rather than finding random folks online any given day. The modding community is still going strong after 30 years though