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From what I've read, Andrew didn't want the stress of leading - So he demoted himself essentially, then regretted the direction the game was going under new management so opted to bail out.

While I certainly couldn't afford to "maintain" as in provide full support for the game, almost anyone could afford to maintain the game's unsupported ways it was already being operated as, meaning the cost of keeping the server running, and occasionally hiring a 3rd party to fix small issues that arise. Unfortunately a negotiation was never offered to me, I was shot down on the idea before money was ever mentioned.

Personally I would be willing to maintain a server for as long as I'm around, but obviously you never know if I'll be getting hit by a bus tomorrow.

I can positively tell you that it takes very minimal effort to maintain the server. Many of the issues the game would have could be solved by a simple server reboot. Unfortunately, all of my Jagex buddies are long gone, but I literally used to ask for someone to run down on lunch break to restart the server right quick, and it would be done. It was very minimal, Jagex as a company just didn't care enough to bother, aside from the few that I was personal friends with.

Trust me when I say that I am not the only one willing to back the monetary promise to keep a server running. There are literally dozens of others.

I have no idea the exact profit that the game brought, but common sense tells you that while there may have only been 100-150 players on at a time, there were at least 1,000 active players that were paying for membership to play the game.

Let's say all of these players paid the MINIMAL rate of $5 USD (grandfathered price), that's $5,000 a month to keep a few computers running. No support, no updates, not even a simple server restart most of the time. Literally zero manpower for $5,000 a month profits.

The only thing I can personally think of is simply $5,000 wasn't much at all to the company in the big picture, so why bother with the hundreds of players that keep nagging for a little support here and there for the small profit of $5,000?

It is in my personal opinion that the company should have left the game open, even one single server, so long as there was still a veteran player spending their time on it. Out of sheer respect to even one single player that helped get this company to the 75 MILLION euro yearly profit that it's earning today.

They do have the codes, they would not release them to allow another developer to take over sadly.

The servers are likely still there, collecting dust and powered off. I am quite confident that it would be a very simply process for Jagex to rummage out a server and boot it up again. Likely running in an hour's work, or less.