What the heck is happening with old free to play games?

🤔Do you have specific game names ?

Gotta give examples when you say stuff like this, yaknow.

If they were reliant on a server, possibly those servers had to be shut down for many reasons like they were costing more than they were making, not enough players to make a full game/match/instance, etc. If the game didn't have like.. a cosmetic shop or something, it may have closed due to money. Also maybe the player numbers just weren't there to justify keeping the servers running. Hell, maybe they just didn't want to keep updating the game for some reason.
If they weren't based on a server..... then IDK.
Depends on the game most likely.

cost vs player base vs time needed to keep content fresh

I'm surprised Spiral Knights is still around. Been playing that recently to finish achievements.

Started playing in 2011, the year it came out. It's funny: the fifth achievement I got was in Oct 2011, the sixth was in Oct 2021. To be able to take a decade-long hiatus from a F2P game is crazy.

Having been around for nearly 12 years now, I figure it's gotta be nearing the end. Through Steam, there are never more than 200 simultaneous players at any given time.

While obviously these things get taken down when they are no longer profitable (SK must still have some whales), it would be interesting to learn about the details of specific games, I guess.

The genre just started to move unto other things. The early 2010s were too saturated with many of them free MMOs, eventually the big online games went to be hero shooters, later battle royales and right now that one's losing well "steam" too. Currently there's also all the online mobile games too but even big ones just don't get enough attention to keep going. Just saw EA is closing APEX and Battlefield mobile which you'd think are big enough but guess not.

Too much cost and saturation of same type of games.

I used to play 'Dragon's Prophet' too, it was a fun game.
'Defiance' has been remade into 'Defiance 2050', but it was pretty much a money grab as the game is pretty much the same and the graphics has only been slightly improved and this version was also closed down.

If you really want to play some of the games, there is a small chance you could find a community ran game.
I loved to play 'BattleForge' back in the day, so I was sad that it was closed down, but now there is a fan-based version of the game named 'Skylords Reborn'. So with some luck, maybe there is a fan-based version of some of your favorite titles.

F2p was a new trend at that time together with microtransactions I think. I used to play some of them, mainly Planetside2 and Warframe in 2013. It was so much fun, then I moved on.

Does it also dissapear from your steam library?

What happened? Games that solely rely on people playing them are going to cease to exist when they are not played anymore by a sufficient number of players.
I know the F2P trend seemed promising to many but the market got too saturated (it still is) and to an extent it corrected itself by time.

I don't see it in your stash, but Dungeons & Dragons Online is still putting out new content. :)
And it has the best build customization around.

On rare occasions popular online games are reverse-engineered. There's a single player playable version of the old Neverwinter Nights AOL online game.

Whats wintry mix ?