This is not a complaint. It's a record.
Freelancer shipped on March 4, 2003. It was published by Microsoft Game Studios. The last official communication from Microsoft about the game was in its launch window — previews, press releases, the standard apparatus of a 2003 PC game release. After that, publicly: nothing.
The official master server shut down at some point in the years following release — the community migrated to unofficial server browsers and patched clients. Microsoft made no announcement about this; it just happened. The Freelancer support page on Microsoft's site has long since been archived or removed. There is no "Freelancer" category in the Xbox back-catalogue. The IP has not appeared on any roadmap, any Xbox showcase, any Game Pass announcement, any Xbox 20th anniversary retrospective, any PC gaming heritage discussion from Microsoft.
This has been true through multiple Microsoft gaming eras: the early Xbox days, the Kinect period, the Phil Spencer era, the Activision Blizzard acquisition period. Twenty years, multiple chapters of Microsoft's gaming strategy, and Freelancer's name has not appeared in any of them.
The IP is owned. Microsoft has not sold it, has not licensed it, has not donated it to a preservation organization, has not released the source code. It is in the vault. That's the correct legal term for it.
What this means practically is that the community has operated entirely without official support for two decades. The multiplayer patches were written without Microsoft's assistance. The HD Edition mod was built without access to source assets. Librelancer is reimplementing the engine without documentation from the original developers. All of this happened because the community needed it to happen and no one else was going to do it.
The 20th anniversary came and went. Microsoft said nothing. The community threw eleven events across nine days. That asymmetry is the story of Freelancer's post-2003 existence in one sentence.
None of this means the silence will last forever. It just means it has lasted this long. The distinction matters.