How unfortunate it may be, there is a very good reason for closing the servers. And that is a six year old game.
Please keep in mind that it's a rare thing in the first place for a company to run free dedicated servers. Especially six years after release of the game. It has always been an extra that Vstep wasn't required to do. So you cannot blame them for eventually stopping with it. Just because you take it for granted, doesn't make them obligated.
To put it more easily; imagine a person providing free cookies every day, every year for no charge at all, and one day he decides to stop with it because he's getting old or whatever reason. Would you put the blame on him for not providing anything anymore? Totally forgetting what he did all those years?
Games age, and some things eventually come to an end. We cannot run servers until 2045.
We did a check on how much the SS08 multiplayer servers were being used opposed to SSE, and against my expectations, we received practically no response from SS08. Especially when the servers were down. Most reports came from Ship Simulator Extremes.
And remember, Vstep only stops hosting their own servers, not the multiplayer feature itself. You can still create your own server if you wish.
So there is zero valid reason to even think about bashing Vstep for this, and I will have no toleration for those who do. A small thank you would be nice, because after all, they could have decided to have never hosted any server at all in the past six years to prevent negative responses from happening later on when they would close them down.
