Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.

I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)

I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features.

The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).

So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.

Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.