I don't disagree with the idea that game companies want a captive audience, and I loathe the microtransaction economy and psychological tricks that fill my game

I don't disagree with the idea that game companies want a captive audience, and I loathe the microtransaction economy and psychological tricks that fill my games with distractions, but I'm not sure if that's directly related to the lack of community servers. I only play Valve games (CSGO, TF2, L4D2), so I don't know how true it is of other companies, but you can still run your own game servers. If anything, it's easier to do so now than it used to be. Few people do it, because the Valve-run servers are easier to interact with and they're good enough for what most people want. The community tried to handle cheaters before, but they weren't good at it. It relied on admins being present, and put the onus on them to identify and kick/ban cheaters. In a large-enough active gaming community, admins were around often enough, but the best they could do was guess at who was cheating. Sure, the egregious cases were obvious, but there was rarely definitive proof, and people who were subtle could cheat without getting caught. Good players who didn't cheat were also the victim of constant accusations. I was banned from plenty of servers just for having a good night and winning. I'm glad that anti-cheat software has gotten good enough that it works for casual play. It's rare that I see anything in CSGO these days that looks like cheating. Sure, it's out there, but it's not very common. On busy weekends as a server admin, I used to kick and ban dozens of people. On the public servers now, I might run into a couple suspicious people all weekend. I don't see companies running servers as directly related. At least in these Valve games, I still get the marketing spam through the Steam client and in the games themselves, and I can still use all the cosmetic junk whether I'm playing on an official server or a private server. It's better now.