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...OK, but you haven't applied any of your vague concepts to the situation at hand. What we have here, taking only the individual case, is at best something like:
September 1: Player spends 20 hours a week on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game played by 100,000 people any given week, which will run no later than next summer at which point it will end. They derive immense joy/value/meaning from the game.
September 30: Player refuses to spend any time on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, and actively regrets prior time they invested, because now 50,000 people play any given week, and the game may drop off further in another month and a half.
There's no reasonably logic to me by which a game that lasted another year with 100,000 people is significantly more meaningful than a game that lasts a shorter period of time with 50,000.
I'm having trouble figuring out how someone loses all those motivations so suddenly under those circumstances. All the aspects of mastery are still there. They're not even meaningfully reduced for the most part*. It's like back in high school, when people would get real upset about breakups, and I'd ask if they figured they were going to marry that particular boyfriend/girlfriend and they'd say no, and I'd say well then obviously you were going to break up some time.
*I may need to check my privilege here, in that I exclusively play desirable classes and I'm not a complete idiot/prick, and so the social aspect of the game may be easier for me even in a reduced population setting than it is for others
I don't think the player numbers really matter, except insofar as they motivate the player to decide to switch to Forever.
September 1: Player spends twenty hours a week on World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game where they're eventually gonna become the best or get all the cool mounts or whatever it is, there's definitely something like that. They are probably not thinking ahead to the far future when the game will shut down, they've just got that vague near-future-but-not-really feeling that they're working towards a goal. It feels almost productive!
September 12(?): WoW Forever gets announced, launching in a couple months. Player makes a plan in their head: they're gonna switch to it on launch day. It'll probably be a little more fun, and a little more popular, and a little more actively maintained without losing that classic charm. They aren't thinking about their TBC Classic Anniversary goals when they make this choice, because those goals only really exist as vague feelings.
September 30: Player regrets spending time in World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, a game where they're never gonna be the best or get all the cool horse armor or anything, because they're going to stop playing it before they have a chance to achieve any of those things. It feels like a waste of time!
Sure but on September 1, the inevitable end of the game was known. Either the servers would move on to Wrath and all your TBC achievements would be irrelevant, or Classic+ would drop, or it would be a low-pop Era server. There was no universe where the "vague near-future-but-not-really feeling" lasted very long. Given that state of affairs, it shocks me that people invested anything that they weren't ok with losing?
I will note one thing that seems rotten is people who spent real money on boosts suddenly finding the toon they boosted in a different position.
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