This is something I've thought about for a while now.

What would happen to all the online-only games (Virtual Villagers Origins 2, Virtual Families 3 etc) if their servers ever went offline? Would they be updated so we could play them offline? Or would they just become permanently inaccessible?
What would that mean for limited-time events and online-only stuff? Would they become lost forever? Or could they be added to the games somehow?

It would be so sad if, in the far future, we wouldn't be able to play certain games anymore. It happens all the time, but still, it's such a shame knowing you can't relive your childhood memories.

Hopefully before they go offline LDW would update them to function indefinitely, especially since you have to buy them on Switch and XBOX.

I've been wondering the same thing. Sadly, I don't really think LDW would care about updating these games to work in offline mode. Such an update would be a really nice surprise, though.

Something I have noticed is that although Virtual Town is an unfinished (and possibly abandoned) game, somehow it appears to still be connected to the LDW servers, since the game needs to access those servers when you first open it on a new day in order to work properly.

I've also been wondering if there is somewhere we can see the leaderboards for such games as Plant Tycoon or the Virtual Villagers series since there's an option to send the player's stats online and receive information about the player's position on the leaderboard.

I can only find the leaderboards for VV2. It's on the LDW Website's game page:

http://www.ldwsoftware.com/vv2_win_scores/index.php

Thank you so much for the VV2 leaderboards, lorsieab2!

There is also a leaderboard for the first VV game:

http://www.ldwsoftware.com/vv_win_scores/index.php

And here is the Fish Tycoon leaderboard

http://www.ldwsoftware.com/ft_win_scores/

I've searched for 'leaderboard' in the Plant Tycoon section of this forum and found a couple topics explaining the absence of a Plant Tycoon leaderboard:

Plant Tycoon Leaderboard
leaderboards