Company like Bethesda or CDProjekt are showing that having one long running game can work too. (Bethesda is a bit strange due to their military contracts but still).
CDProjekt are even more interesting because they are behind GOG.com . Which spend time making old game playable on recent PC, but sell them for a price when they were abandonware before. Most of the time without DRM. The interesting part is they do make money through it. Which shows that you can keep a small but longterm income from your backcatalogue.
At the same time, they are making abandonware harder to support through copyright exception since copyright holders now make money again ...
I always saw Abandonware as a necessary evil, flagrant copyright violation when the copyright holder has zero interest on their property, but GOG and such are a good alternative. Not only the games are sold at reasonable prices and put under rather regular sales, but avoiding DRM does make sharing significantly easier.
I am curious to know what you are talking about. I've never heard Bethesda getting money from the DoD. And I've found nothing, since all search results are mixed with info about the military base in the city called Bethesda.
Bohemia Interactive created a division, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, to handle the military training software, which has worked with other NATO countries.
But from the Wikipedia page, the division has been bought by an equity firm, The Riverside Company, in 2013. So Bohemia Interactive doesn't deal anymore with the military, even if they might still have contact in the military, since they have developed military simulations.
Even those impose centralized control on there software though:
I assume you mean Bohemia Interactive, who make ARMA?
I make the same mistake.
Thus Southkorea still plays StarCraft, and if it weren't for backwards incompatibility slowly grinding old software to dust- a lot of people instead of buying new, dlc infested - constructions sites that might contain fun in the future- would play the old titles.
The industrys idea of revenue here is to churn the wheel of decay as fast as possible, with as much as additional sales while the customer does not buy the actual product.
The old idea of a game was to provide as much entertainment, often as long as possible (bind the customer to you)- and this means there are still shards with Ultima Online, still people playing RedAlert2 and CC:Generals. From a business point of view- this is the secret oil of the industry- there is a finite amount of people, with a finite amount of time. There are different grades of people (aka income) but that can change.
Something like MineCraft is a world destroying catastrophe in these eyes.
If you carefully look, you can see the ripples of "Long Value Release" and Studios closing due to people not buying games for years after.
So, what does the industry fear? A summer where all play some old forgotten modded title, while not even the flys circle over the loot boxes in the stores.
Thus, loosing control over the online service- has nothing to do with piracy, but everything to do with loosing control over the end-of-life of your product.
You cant patch some games balance into oblivion to sell the successor- if you do no longer control the servers.