The thing is, nobody really expects the companies to keep the servers online forever ( at least according to the petition ), that would unreasonable. People ask that online games are either patched to allow offline play after delisting, or provide protocol information to allow non-official servers, again after delisting.

Normally I'd agree with you, it's the developer's prerogative to schedule games in order to maximize their profits, but for the past decade there have been A LOT of online only games, even single player games that require a connection just because ( see the recent forza motorsport, or simcity 2013 ). There's a clear tendency in the industry to force this as a form of planned obsolescence and that needs to stop.

And yes, I realize that even if the petition materializes into something the developers will find a loophole. This is why I'd advocate more towards educating gamers to recognize and avoid abusive patterns. See the crew 2, where even if they basically give it away now, it's still chock full of mtx and dark patterns, and a lot of games that are designed to be online only have those patterns ( I for one learned to recognize these and avoid the game and/or the developerr altogether ).