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And yet I can put a Gran Turismo DVD in my old PS2 (was that GT4 or GT5?) and play with it. No networking (it never had that) but perfectly playable.

If your game needs a server to be played, you also sell the server. Somebody will put it on a machine somewhere and manage it. I have no direct experience of Minecraft but it used to be more or less like that, right?

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Minecraft can work perfectly well without a central server, provided you have downloaded the game. They do have an authentication scheme to tell the server you own a legit copy of the game, but if that were to go down, the game would still be playable. Server software includes a "online mode" property that can easily be set to false to accept all clients regardless of central auth status. This of course opens a new can of worms but there are solutions that already exist.

Gran Turismo 4 was the last Gran Turismo for the PS2. It also did support networking for LAN gameplay but networking isn't required to play the game.

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