Comment by reactordev

Correct. The backends to these online games isn’t complicated, but it is protected. They want the ability to resell the entire service to another game studio to run.

This has happened a lot in the past. EverQuest, Pirates, Lots of mmos have changed studios and with that, the backend services needed to run them.

Now, that said, there are a few countries in the EU that you could reverse engineer the server and it’s totally legal. Some of the best fun I’ve had were on private WoW or Lineage 2 servers.