Either developers are locking their users into Epic/Steam/Apple/PlayStation in exchange for services/users, or they're rolling your own solution with PlayFab/Nakama/Pragma and are stuck footing the bill once their game fades away. Both business models are bad for developers and gamers.

Now for the sameless self plug: we wanted to solve these problems but with a business model that primarily serves developers at Rivet (W23).

Instead, we offer cross-platform console-like services as a REST API for free (friends, parties, leaderboards) and only charge for services that help developers build/grow their games (multiplayer servers, matchmaking, CDN, database). Our #1 priority is providing the best services possible to developers. There's no incentive to rent-seek or lock in your users since we're a services company, not a platform company. Any data your users generate is yours to keep.

Regarding operating legacy multiplayer servers: We plan to let users pay for their own game servers instead of developers fronting the cost. This way, developers can operate legacy games at no cost by letting users "own" their servers and easily enable custom game servers. It's like allowing users to self-host games but without having to open-source your software. Plus, many games can't run as a standalone binary and need the supporting infrastructure.

We're still in closed beta, but there's more info here if you're curious: https://rivet.gg/developer/