Are articles on discontinued MMORPGs allowed?

I believe they should only be allowed if the discontinued MMORPG has no known virtual servers created by fans of the game online, like for example Monkey Quest and Foster's Home Big Fat Awesome House Party have no known virtual servers and are inaccessible even if you have an old installer for them. On the other hand, I believe recovering old assets for online MMORPGs that have been rescued by fans like the earlier versions of Toontown would be impossible unless someone who logged in and tested the game's beta access or the developers who were involved in the beta still somehow has the files extracted from the beta.

The discontinued MMORPG games released physically, however, are a different story altogether.




Once the servers for a physically released MMORPG are shutdown, the game is virtually unplayable with no way to make it past the log-in screen because the game still relies on its servers to be up at all times. One notable example I can think of this happening is the 2011 action-RPG game Darkspore developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts when its servers shutdown on March 1st, 2016, making all of the physical copies of the game unplayable. In the video I linked above, I agree with LGR that all games deserve to be preserved, even if they are bad.

So in other words, I believe physically released discontinued MMORPG games are eligible for articles because not only are they inaccessible, they are also unplayable even if you have a physical copy of the game and there is no way to crack the game's code once the game's servers have shutdown.

I think defunct MMORPG games are applicable, but it depends on how you'd classify them. There are some who have managed to recreate older MMO games such as Toontown, Club Penguin, and older versions of World of Warcraft.