I think that part of this trend may be tied to games, such as PUBG, becoming popular while still "under development". I imagine once a game has a stable server

I think that part of this trend may be tied to games, such as PUBG, becoming popular while still "under development". I imagine once a game has a stable server build it is much more practical to distribute that server to all of the community operators and have them update on a fixed / infrequent schedule. Whereas, while changes are still being constantly made to the server application, this would probably result in users only being able to connect to a small fraction of available community servers while waiting for the other servers to update.