>>714472862
>does it?
Yes. There is a whole bunch of potential costs and / or lost profits. Exactly how much depeneds entirely on the specific circumstances and specific choice of solutions. The act of migrating your game from a central server dependency can be as trivial as removing/change few lines of code, to being as drastic as effectively rewriting your game from the ground out. Solutions can vary from the aformentioned minor patch (which still isn't free), to developing custom server infrastructure (which can cost quite a lot) to maintaining your own servers indefinitely (which costs a lot a lot).
Again, there is no one universal model or one universal solution, it depends on the core architecture of the original game. In a lot of cases, the central-server dependence can be so fundamental to the games code that getting rid of it could cost you almost as much as making a new game from a scratch.
Plus, there are also non-obvious costs, namely potential legal liabilities, and potential lost sales on other products. The latter of which is actually probably the biggest concern of most major publishers. They don't want you to play a 5 years old game that you paid 5 bucks for, if they can actively force you to play the most recent, 60 dollar one instead. Forced obsolescence is an incredibly powerful tool of profit, and this industry is heavily build around that.
