Shutting down game servers always a sad news...

Yep. I just heard the other day that (Maxis) EA just shut down all the Sims Online servers. Maybe this doesn't mean much to the SI community, because we don't play that girly stuff. But as things are going on in the future I might even want to lay my hands on that Sims 3 game... Looks pretty neat.

And yeah, so it goes down... Sad for someone, but still doesn't mean much to most of us. Those are really old games.

tought these games have an age if you get me but server shutdown is caused mostly that they don't get any winning money of it could be cause of the global economical problems or just that the games are dead or almost dead

Most of the games have no players on the Servers now (Dark Reign 2 & Ground Control II, I know definitely) and a lot have sequels. Sierra have lost Vivendi to Activision Blizzard, and those guys were their biggest developers.

That's very true heretodus, as time goes on, it's only normal that player count decreases. Unlike WoW, which is only tending to increase, weird stuff.
And of course that it's quite sad, because if you built a reputation online, you either pass on to another game, or become an Hero for all those that played with you for those countless days.

I have always felt that it would be a very big "good faith" move on the part of those holding the code rights if they would release the server code to the gaming community at the time when servers/master-servers are discontinued for a game.

Maybe I am just being naive...

Good question Orv. To partly answer this, it is unfortunately an expensive undertaking to run a server, let alone rent one. To rent a server on say CoD4 is around AUD $200 per month. Imagine then the cost to own and run one, let alone decide which company to contract with. Like it or not, gamers are pretty tight-fisted when it comes to spending, and paying to use a server on an old game with questionable member audience is a huge financial risk with no reward. We tried here n Australia with a modded version of CoD2, and the hiring of it alone was prohibitive...with no promise of continued service.

I had a comment, but I questioned whether it was proper to mention here... so I deleted it. (Due to legality)
Needless to say, I have heard of games being taken by fan communities and servers run on micro scale, hosting a server list and allowing individuals to host single servers.