Hrmmmm, well I think the problem is the corperate mentality as many people have pointed out. Corperations nowadays are not simply out to make a fair profit (take in more money than they spend), but to grow at a specific, forecasted rate. The issue is that you have a bunch of suits who have experts telling them that to be considered successful they will need to grow "X" amount in the next billing cycle to remain competitive. These forecasts being based on what the most successful titles in video games are making. Basically if your FPS makes a hundred million dollars in profit, and someone else's makes 250 million that's considered a failure. Likewise if you don't make X % more money than you did at the same time the year before that's considrred a failure. It's not like a business is going to say "whelps we spent a few hundred million, but made it all back plus $50k that's a win", if projections say a company should say make 20% more this year than last year and you don't do that, then it's considered a failure.
That's insane, but it's sadly how the corperate mentality works. In part because the shareholders view the whole thing as a game themselves, and don't generally have any vested interest in any product. If a stock isn't performing they just dump it and buy one that will.
When it comes to servers and such, common sense dictates that maintaining servers should be considered as part of the $60 price tag and development costs. Sadly that's not the case nowadays, as those "costs" are a constant drain, companies want other revenue streams to maintain them. After all they want to take their big lumps of cash and spend or invest them, not keep them around to pay upkeep fees and spend years finding out exactly how much money they made after interest fades and the servers close down.