From Software patched the original Dark Souls PC port to remove Games For Windows Live when that service shut down, replaced it with steam networking. This was years and years before the remaster, so they weren’t making money on it - they just up and fixed it. MMOs? A bunch of unpaid modders brought up the first WoW custom servers, and some of those were reverse engineered.
Your argument doesn’t pass the “just look and see if it’s true” test.
grue@lemmy.world 1 day ago
WTF are you talking about? Every multiplayer PC game had that when I was growing up; it was just the normal way multiplayer worked. One player hosts a game and the other players type in their IP address and join it. Server browsers using external infrastructure (whether third-party, like GameSpy, or first-party, like Battle.net) didn’t come until later, and even then, they were just matchmaking services and the game server itself was still run by you.
Restricting multiplayer to only servers run by the publisher is the abnormal, fucked-up thing!