> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer.

That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death.

Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.