Honestly, it's probably simpler than this, and the root of the problem often comes down to the Cloud Providers to begin with.
It's astounding the frequency I get an email from some cloud provider, or mobile app store that says something to the effect of:
"(Version X) of Dependency Y that we convinced you to use 5+ years ago is getting deprecated on August 1st, if you don't upgrade to Version X+5 you're service will go offline"
And we're stuck looking at the minimal amount of players running of that platform, and the hard choice of do we move precious human resources off of some in-progress game, that's already running late to learn a system that they never worked on, because the original people are long gone?
So, that's often why our network services, and mobile versions of our games are being taken offline while the single binary we shipped to one of the serious console vendors 10-20 years ago is still running, and now running on consoles 2 generations newer.
So, yeah, it'd be great if we could ship a package for Amazon to host perpetually, but first you could just get Amazon to care enough to ship a stable platform to build upon that wouldn't get depreciated.
But then, having also lived it, upgrading to newer versions of PHP and it's required modules is also not trivial.
And it's often not just your language, the cloud vendors have a lot of incentives to get you to use their hosted Postgres, or AuroraDB, or GameLift. Or even something as simple as we built all of our deployment scripts/images for our PHP system on Amazon Linux X, and now for reason Y, only Amazon Linux X+2 is supported.
It's astounding the frequency I get an email from some cloud provider, or mobile app store that says something to the effect of:
"(Version X) of Dependency Y that we convinced you to use 5+ years ago is getting deprecated on August 1st, if you don't upgrade to Version X+5 you're service will go offline"
And we're stuck looking at the minimal amount of players running of that platform, and the hard choice of do we move precious human resources off of some in-progress game, that's already running late to learn a system that they never worked on, because the original people are long gone?
So, that's often why our network services, and mobile versions of our games are being taken offline while the single binary we shipped to one of the serious console vendors 10-20 years ago is still running, and now running on consoles 2 generations newer.
So, yeah, it'd be great if we could ship a package for Amazon to host perpetually, but first you could just get Amazon to care enough to ship a stable platform to build upon that wouldn't get depreciated.