Online games will always have an expiration date simply based on the active player baseYeah. But a lot of games have very low requirements for online matches.
Easy to find some that simply require 3-18 players at a time .
The reason games get shut down is because they have servers dedicated to that game. It doesn't have to work that way.
Games can be dynamically given resources or have resources taken away as players come and go.
Works exactly the same as a dedicated server performance wise.
But if resources are dynamically allocated, games with no players will take up essentially zero resources.
Popular games will run as they normally would.
There is no real downside to setting it up this way, and tons of pros. The only hassle is setting up a cloud infrastructure, which most companies already have.