Here’s a few, as someone who has worked in games for 12 years.

Most games have code and design decisions that hark back 25+ years. Every single unreal engine game for example is based code written in the mid 2000s and some parts of the engine really feel like it. Online components are developed the same way. If you made a multiplayer game 10 years ago and it was successful, your next game is going to be built on top of that. I’ve seen places that use stored procedures in Oracle DB for gameplay logic, others that rely on any number of SQL server specific tricks. Closed source dotnet frameworks, proprietary AWS services, if you can think of it there’s probably a game shipped on it. You’re also making the assumption that the server is a neatly coupled thing.

Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?

What about the licenses for the code that affects other areas - we have a GPL’ed library here that we can use but now all of a sudden the vitality of the license means we have to replace it?

Who defines “ordinary use of the game”?. If the game has a multiplayer component, to some large number of users that can construe “ordinary use”. call of Duty is the best example of this (although COD is probably one of the games with the best track record here).

This is going to result in games moving more towards the Hollywood studio model - start up a company, launch a game and wind down the company for the next project. People who rely on that already unstable industry will be given even less stability due to this.

> I have a hard time imagining the server architecture would change much

That’s great - I’m sure if it’s that little work you’re willing to do it for all of those games companies.

> A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden

Game backends are just like Other backends. Some use event queues, microservices, third party APIs, licensed components. This adds a burden that no other software is expected to carry - it’s perfectly fine for Google to drop support for their devices but a 25 person company needs to go back and fix all their old games if they want to keep selling them?