I used to work for a mod for Battlefield (PoE) - we had a few tens of thousands of regular players and a few hundred servers running it at the peak. There was n

I used to work for a mod for Battlefield (PoE) - we had a few tens of thousands of regular players and a few hundred servers running it at the peak. There was no money in PoE at all, the whole thing was built by volunteers and all the servers were run by the community - groups of people who just wanted to support the game. The costs were pretty low, a few hundred dollars a month, and they'd be split amongst a group of 10 or 20 people who all got a sense of ownership over their own server. I don't really see it as a massive unsolved problem, it's the digital equivalent of kids throwing a house party - you trade a little bit of cash / effort for a sense of ownership in a community.