I would have totally agreed, but it looks like Steam offers free matchmaking backend and P2P proxies. Why isn't this widely known???

Honestly, it's probably simpler than this, and the root of the problem often comes down to the Cloud Providers to begin with.

It's astounding the frequency I get an email from some cloud provider, or mobile app store that says something to the effect of:

"(Version X) of Dependency Y that we convinced you to use 5+ years ago is getting deprecated on August 1st, if you don't upgrade to Version X+5 you're service will go offline"

And we're stuck looking at the minimal amount of players running of that platform, and the hard choice of do we move precious human resources off of some in-progress game, that's already running late to learn a system that they never worked on, because the original people are long gone?

So, that's often why our network services, and mobile versions of our games are being taken offline while the single binary we shipped to one of the serious console vendors 10-20 years ago is still running, and now running on consoles 2 generations newer.

So, yeah, it'd be great if we could ship a package for Amazon to host perpetually, but first you could just get Amazon to care enough to ship a stable platform to build upon that wouldn't get depreciated.

This isn't a technical problem. It's a legal and corporate political one. Copyright and patent issues are no more likely to go away with Amazon. Also Amazon's gaming division may make them a potential competitor.

I also doubt that such a could service would be immune to corperate restructuring by the like of Amazon. We need gaming companies to be more comfortable providing server binaries if we want anything that lasts.

The reason for the “de facto expiration date” is that eventually not enough people will want to play the game for matchmaking to be consistently available.

Honestly Valve had it right with offering dedicated server packages. I respect any studio that does the same, like TripWire and Killing Floor.

I run my own private server for a live service game that shut down in just 1 year. We got lucky because they seemingly bundled the server code into the client. But the game was never meant to allow for that...

What you have described is survivorship bias. What matters is whether the refund request rate is higher than other games.

The people who enjoyed your game because it has couch coop (and therefore don’t request a refund) aren’t represented in that refund request stat.

I mean, you can make both available.

I assume those asymmetric multiplayer games are hard to maintain an audience. Everyone wants to be the super charged monster, nobody wants to be the squishie. Unless you can shore up the difference with bots, you are going to have to play dramatically more rounds as the less-fun squishie.

There have been various attempts at that type of asymmetric multiplayer over the years and most of them have had serious issues with game balance. I think the most successful has been Dead by Daylight and at high levels of play usually turns into a deadlock.

Traditional gaming journalism as once existed with magazines and later websites modeled after those magazines is wholly obsolete. For game discovery, reviews, and game tricks and tips, it has been replaced by independent youtubers and streamers. We're all much better off for this too, the new system gives much wider and deeper coverage to much more obscure games than the magazines ever could or would. Just as one example, Master Hellish creates an absolute ton of OpenTTD tutorials and showcase videos. The most the old games journalism industry would ever make for a game like that is one or two articles highlighting it as an obscure novelty, but never going I'm depth with the game mechanics.