I’m not a life sim gamer but my wife is (Sims3/4). If this happened to her, she would break down. Not because she’s a loon but because she’s invested so much time “raising” her tomagachi rebel alliance (she hates when I call it that). If the company doesn’t want to pay for servers, I think they should provide the tools and option to run your own server. They don’t even need to support the tools, the community will figure it out.

Stray thought… I miss my BF1942 server patched for 128 players. I paid more than a fist full of yen to host the beast. Worth.