> I was responding to the parents assertion that server software shipped with games 10-12 years ago

Fair enough, I guess the 10-12 year timeframe isn't far enough in the past. Tho I do remember official servers for L4D2 being a thing, in addition to the ability for players to run their own, on their own hardware.

> Whether they got flack or not is irrelevant, the vocal minority, especially in PC gaming is very dangerous.

It wasn't a "vocal minority" when the change happened because the community hosting servers themselves used to be the norm before companies stopped shipping dedicated server software with their games.

In that context, the flack was well deserved as we can now see the impact it had on the overall gaming landscape, namely: Taking away the players ability to run their own servers, which means players are now at the mercy of the company to decide when a multiplayer-only game will stop being playable.

That wasn't an issue when dedicated server software was commonly shipped with games, back then players could just set up a server on their own hardware, extending the life of the game way past official support, and allowing them to keep playing the game they paid money for.

> renting servers from us(tm) is decidedly _not_ a server package that you host yourself, although it's paid for, I'm not sure if it covers the costs of running.

But that wasn't the point, the point there is that while technically players can now still get "their own servers" these are not actually "their own servers", they are still at the mercy of the company supporting the game and actually offering that option, while at the same time giving players zero ability to customize the hardware and more advanced server settings.

It's the gaming equivalent of "outsourcing into the cloud instead of running your own hardware".

> Regardless; your comment talks exclusively about PC titles, but the majority of AAA titles that have server backends are cross platform.

My comment is specifically talking about the time when games would still ship with their own dedicated server software so players could set them up on their own hardware.

Which has by now pretty much died out because the closest thing to that which still exists is the EA variant of "We can rent you the server, but you still can't use your own hardware".

> I can't say it's unfair but if we were to sell only on PC, releasing a server package and making directory services, we would not have covered the cost of making the game by even a third.

As a consumer I consider it very unfair, particularly in the context that for quite a while it worked quite well, it was the de-facto way how multiplayer was facilitated.

Which by now has been completely replaced with "games as a service" and P2P based matchmaking, where publishers have the ultimate say how long you are allowed to play the game, even when players would be willing to pay for the server and the bandwidth themselves.

Why take that option away? Why put these artificial expiration dates on the games? It's just a very extreme change, particularly considering that to this day one can still find privately hosted servers for all kinds of games from 20 years ago.

This works because the dedicated server software wasn't "locked away", as such these games had their life extended by decades. Something that will be utterly impossible with the vast majority of modern releases where the dedicated servers are pretty much in their own little "walled garden" as to best facilitate MTX and have the ability to just shut the game down once it ain't considered profitable anymore or the publisher wants to force the player base into the newest release of the franchise.

Nobody is arguing that companies should pay for servers indefinitely, all that people are asking for is the ability to run their own servers as not to have their games artificially made obsolete when the publisher decides to shut down all the official servers.