I guess it depends what you mean by need. Many multiplayer games (like AoE2) have switched to a hosted server approach because it’s better for performance and matchmaking. I mean, thinking back 15 years, non-LAN multiplayer was not very good at all. Even LAN multiplayer could be hard to set up. Even today, it’s fairly limited (especially since your upload speed is probably severely limited). But hosted servers for everything have been fantastic. Multiplayer FPS games have extremely good performance. Network issues for games like AoE2 aren’t nearly as prevalent.