It may be legal to steal digital items from users because of antiquated laws that don't recognize digital items as items worthy of protection, but it certainly isn't moral.
1. Should Zynga buy back those items at a lower price because they are used items?
2. What happens to cars (because we love car analogies) when the manufacturer stops building spare parts? In this case they are either collected from old cars or somebody else build those parts. Maybe should Zynga at least try to sell the game infrastructure with data? That would be like relying on third party spare parts but the car keeps going. Of course if nobody buys the game, maybe even for free, that's it
3. Other ideas?
By the way, this isn't the first time an online game shuts down and players lose everything, right?
There's a big difference between "we're not making spare parts for your car anymore" and "we put a thermite charge in your car's engine, and we're remotely detonating it the day that we stop making spare parts for it".
When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought. This was the correct response to shutting down servers.
> When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought.
They probably had different terms of sale; buying books contingent on an external service is less attractive than buying in-game items contingent on the game.
> This was the correct response to shutting down servers.
Depending on the terms of sale, it may have been the minimum legally required response.
Car manufacturers are legally required to provide spare parts for about 7 years after sale. That's part of why discontinued car models are destroyed instead of sold at clearance discount.
And parts can be reverse-engineered/cloned too (as long as they aren't software-locked).
Zynga could offer to it's user to give their users credits to use in an alternate game, if they want.
