Dedicated game servers are only part of the problem. The matchmaking/community-connecting servers were also implicated in the outages discussed in TFA.
Community/matchmaking servers don't distribute ("run your own server") too well. If you only ever want to play with and against people you know, that's fine, but a lot of people don't want that: some want to play on randomized (or ranked, if the game supports it, across a large number of players; not just the ones in the potentially-altered rankings on a single person's server) teams. Others (more commonly) want to play against new and different teams.
Unless your graph of social connections willing to agree to use a given server is big enough and the right shape, hosting your own matchmaking/community services just results in isolated islands without a vibrant overarching community.
Put another way: the separate-server approach of e.g. TF2 works fine for some, but a lot (judging by play counts) of other folks prefer games with a centralized community.
To be clear, I think it's fine to have the option of a separate community server. But if a game developer already has the centralized infrastructure, is making tons of money off of it, and spending tremendous resources keeping it intact (as Epic apparently is), it's a pretty tough sell to say "oh and you should also spend the resources to make a hosted option for this".
"Take the complex thing designed for centralized, single-instance internal use with a team of support staff, put it in a box, and let users run it on their own hosts" is far from a simple proposition.
I'm unsure if any companies doing centralized community servers/community federation also have a large portion of their actual game servers not hosted by the company; I'd love some examples of that phenomenon. The examples of Minecraft and TF2 come to mind as doing some subparts of that, but those games only have limited matchmaking capabilities.
Community/matchmaking servers don't distribute ("run your own server") too well. If you only ever want to play with and against people you know, that's fine, but a lot of people don't want that: some want to play on randomized (or ranked, if the game supports it, across a large number of players; not just the ones in the potentially-altered rankings on a single person's server) teams. Others (more commonly) want to play against new and different teams.
Unless your graph of social connections willing to agree to use a given server is big enough and the right shape, hosting your own matchmaking/community services just results in isolated islands without a vibrant overarching community.
Put another way: the separate-server approach of e.g. TF2 works fine for some, but a lot (judging by play counts) of other folks prefer games with a centralized community.
To be clear, I think it's fine to have the option of a separate community server. But if a game developer already has the centralized infrastructure, is making tons of money off of it, and spending tremendous resources keeping it intact (as Epic apparently is), it's a pretty tough sell to say "oh and you should also spend the resources to make a hosted option for this".
"Take the complex thing designed for centralized, single-instance internal use with a team of support staff, put it in a box, and let users run it on their own hosts" is far from a simple proposition.
I'm unsure if any companies doing centralized community servers/community federation also have a large portion of their actual game servers not hosted by the company; I'd love some examples of that phenomenon. The examples of Minecraft and TF2 come to mind as doing some subparts of that, but those games only have limited matchmaking capabilities.