Well, "our investors demand more monetization then what's possible when first-party servers don't have a monopoly" is a actual, real, problem; the problem is that the investors have too much control over the software design.

> There are dedicated servers for World of Warcraft.

There were dedicated (third-party, ie potentially self-hosted) servers; last I checked (when I wanted to give WoW another try) Blizzard has been agressively C&Ding them whenever it can.