> it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages
This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.
The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.
Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)
This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.
The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.
Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)