In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it. However, games that use such standardized services are actually less problematic in practice. For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator, which emulates Steam’s online features. Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator. Even for services that had already been shut down, like Gamespy back then, Openspy quickly emerged as an alternative. Not all games worked right away, but the community fixed most of the issues very quickly. So, in the end, the games that use some kind of custom solution built by the developer themselves are much more important.