Like Carmack says in the article, these dimensions of cost are a choice. Games which have private servers that anyone can run last forever at no cost to the com

Like Carmack says in the article, these dimensions of cost are a choice. Games which have private servers that anyone can run last forever at no cost to the company. But studios (excepting Valve with TF2) have never been able to make a game with microtransactions/etc that also works with private servers. So they chose the money instead of making a good game.