So... it's the same problems that we've always had hosting a dedicated game server fleet. Game solutions have always been custom because there's never some one

So... it's the same problems that we've always had hosting a dedicated game server fleet. Game solutions have always been custom because there's never some one-size-fits-all engine(although bless Unreal and Unity for taking a shot at it). I speak from real experience here here and not just some hypothetical stance. The design and structure of your game will have implications on how your matchmaking/sharding plays out across a region. Just because gamedev uses windows to a degree doesn't make Linux some big scary thing. PS3 was closer to Linux than anything else. I was running dedicated Linux servers for Half-Life/Quake/etc over 20 years ago so it's not like that's anything new. If you're doing matchmaking based servers that's the easy case. You don't have any shared state, you can scale down when a match ends. When you start crossing into the shared state(MMO, non-sharded worlds, etc) that's where it's not easy to just horizontally scale out.