Lan patches cost money to make, big money if the game was originally massive multiplayer. Since the game is at EOL it cannot generate any profits, meaning any money spent on development of such lan patches is going to just burn a hole in the company’s budget.
Releasing server side source code opens up a route for abusing the game studio making the game. Since if some 3rd part wants to profit off of running private servers of that game, all they have to do is make a flood of bots in-game and on the game’s communication platforms (eg discord servers, communities on Reddit or even Lemmy), which is not that hard to do nowadays, especially if you’re a corporation. This coupled with finding as many in-game exploits as possible can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the studio, forcing them to release server side source code, which the corpos can then grab and monetize the crap out of. Since the bot flood can be made nigh untraceable by having them operate out of an unfriendly state (say, Russia or China), and there’s no studio acquisition necessary to get server side code, this would be a perfect extortion method that’d fly under the radar of antitrust legislation
I mixed up words, what I meant was that the company could be harassed before it’d go bankrupt and EOL the game
Now you misunderstood the statement. When the game is still hosted by the original devs/publishers, in-game bots would 1) tank the user experience (imagine tf2 but like half a year after launch) 2) put strain on the servers, the ones that still belong to the devs/publisher While that is going on, bots spamming media related to the game would tank engagement (who would want to play a game filled with bots that also has like no public community around it that isn’t ruined by other bots). All that would make the revenue crash, and turn the game into a huge financial burden, causing the eventual drop of support/bankruptcy
I won’t pick the rest of the comment apart, since you didn’t quite get how this extortion scheme works (partly due to my poor explanation, but still)