lets have fun and guess when MA will go out of business and why. Guess the date and the reason My entry 17 September 2016 Lost law suit.
Problems with a Version Update somewhere around 2017/2018 which causes the servers to crash. They find out that the last backup they made was done by Marco and they decide to restore that one. After that the game will thrive and be better then ever with all the old players coming back. Then around 2025 we have a huge solar wind that cripples everything electronic and EU shuts down forever.
It won't go out of business... It'll be here forever. Eventually you will never die as you upload your soul in to your avatar, only to see it's market value steadily decline, wondering all the while why you decided to avoid the heaven or hell of the afterlife and chose pixels on a damn server instead.
TBH ... they survived with all this bugs and glitches, with all this broken promises and mistakes and the castle in Germany since 2003. That's a huge achievement. Right now they deserve a place in the Hall Of Fame of MMRPOG already. I think they will go offline ~one year after David Simmonds' death. No clue how healthy he is and cancer, stroke or car accidents are hard to estimate. I am nearly 62. I'm tempted to say Simmonds will survive longer than me. So from my POV: Forever.
Wow this is morbid... hmm... realistically it could be any time... But that said in theory the only thing to kill it really would be if people stopped playing. If they halt development and run a skeleton crew, which they more or less have, then in theory if the server costs are covered and a min crew to keep hamsters fed is able to be paid it will keep going for another 5 years I'd say... so yeh I guess I am with McCormick. My 5 years is kinda a guess on how long before people will think the graphics and bugs are too much to tollerate by modern standards. Tricky to call though because we have already reached the point where graphics are good enough it seems. But that said I know when I look at old games I used to think had good graphics they look awful now. Not alwasy true though and it depends on the age of the game. I was considering playing Jedi Knight because of fond memories of the epic large environments of Nar Shadar. But really it looks very crappy now gfx wise. Jedi Knight 2 on the other hand looks fine. Similarly some time back there was a tomb raider sale on. I only bought as far back as 7 as anything beyond that looked really yucky.
