“So while we could assume that they are point-in-time backups of players, the oddity of the stream being actually interrupted is throwing monkey wrenches into the works.”

It could be as simple as a player lagging off instead of logging off, so the connection of the player getting interrupted and the player not logging back in to perform a proper logoff. This could leave the player state in an uncollected (paused) state, which could be stored somewhere waiting for the player to log back in.

The players could have died of natural causes, disconnected because of a network error or just rage quit without logging off properly. This happens with irl games too, but most of the time a timer collects the player states and logs them off if the player does not reconnect.

For a really old mmo-fps-rpg game called Neocron the network disconnects were really common back in the early 2000-s, so you had a high chance of getting sync errors on zone chanes and even crossing the safe part of the main city needed a dozen of them. Also any high ping spikes could also get you de sync-ed. The game detected this and saved your state and you could resume later. Of course the world usually moved by then, getting you back to the same location at a later date when you could log in again. Properly logging off in safe zone, next to a respawn point was the proper way to exit the game.

“I’m just saying, pretty sure the game company would notice the “memory leak” of all those “unnecessary things” being simulated.”

Since the speed of time is essentially disconnected if there are no players logged in, the whole hundreds of years could be ran during a night or weeked after the last player logged off and before an admin turned off the system. Of the whole system could run on a virtual computer in the far future, where the saved server state was resumed either by a human or more advanced AI. This would mean the resources for the game are much higher than what was available during normal operation. A good example is the game Neocron mentioned above. Originally each zone needed a whole server and there more than a hundred zones. The game system was still running in 2020 when i last checked but with much less active players (a dozen at most instead of thousands). The whole system was running on a single virtual node in the cloud with each original server instance using a tiny portion of the node and running in their own process that was started only when a player entered it and shut back down when the last player exited it. Btw. that was a game where NPC/MOB AI was the same and which was which for you was determined by your faction points and your actions. Someone’s MOB could be another player’s friendly NPC.

As long as the comic’s game world remains disconnected from the real world, the real world time scale remains unknown. The game world could be running much faster than real time, covering thousands of years under a few seconds or much slower, running in the background somewhere, mostly eating up idle time. This could get us from just a few seconds after the last irl player to thousands of irl years in the future. In the first case, no human operator could have discovered (yet) the running away game state and the second case nobody cared about if for a really long time as it was not eating too many resources.