Actually since this is cohost and absolutely nobody reads my cohost posts I think I can safely say yeah, this is from first-hand experience, haha, I'm in pain.
"Why don't they just make an offline version that won't be updated?" Oh you sweet summer child, if a studio already can't afford to keep a game running do you think they can afford to pay people to make an offline version? Even disregarding game design issues (many live-service games are balanced for constant updates), the technical tinkering needed is non-trivial.
And even if you just keep it at low-maintenance mode (no update but server is up), well, low-maintenance is not no-maintenance, especially in this day and age where everything gets updates (like, your phones). Something will break, and then you'd have to take it down from the app stores or receive the wrath of angry gamers. Having both a game and a server means twice the possibility of things breaking.
"Well just fix them if a problem comes up" is an easy thing to say when you realise the issue is in codes that haven't been touched in two years and the original developers are on totally different headspace already, if you're lucky. Or they might have left gamedev entirely to take up a stable career in accounting. What's that? "Just read the documentation"? Oh, you're really lucky, aren't you?"
Anyway I'm just ranting. I'm sure Android Studio will stop throwing errors at me eventually
