Why old games never die, but new ones do

The latest shutdown of xlabs (which was speculated to be a mix of offering download links to games and having a Patreon for the licensing dumpster fire of the BOIII client) led directly to a different group making CoD clients to require a Steam account check to ensure you bought the game. Some developers like EA had compromises: you could pay to rent a server for Battlefield games until Battlefield V. You can’t have access to the game files of course and it’s all done through providers they approve or directly from the game menus (with consoles), but you can still play these games online with player hosted servers with communities they form and their own rules. Most of this has to do with selling DLC packs, while in the case of Battlefield Bad Company 2 this had to do “officially” with the Frostbite engine having horrible quality editors that needed a special setup at EA to use and couldn’t exactly be released to the public without a lot of code cleanup.