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I don't believe RL or other modern online games could survive with even a tenth of the player base if they didn't have decent matchmaking, and you can't have decent matchmaking if you depend on players finding each other outside the game and one of them running a server and sharing the IP address. It's way too much friction to expect most players to do that.

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You can still run a default/master server.

Console games survive perfectly fine without any sort of anticheat/etc, maybe that would be bad for PC gaming but games could sustain their player base without anticheat, and matchmaking is neither necessary (lots of multiplayer games just don't use it at all) nor is it particularly expensive to run if that's all you're doing.

Obviously that would be a problem on the PC but games would remain popular and publishers would get paid without either of those things. Games as a whole wouldn't go anywhere. They just make more money this way.

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