i am not making shit up, I promise I've ran many game servers over the years. I am obviously generalizing as of course there are counter examples especially MMOs.

But then there is warcraft 1 through 3 that were peer to peer and quake, half life, unreal, painkiller, enemy territory, and just about every fps game of the era that came with the software to run your own dedicated server, or could host a listen server while playing.

If you want to just look at a single very mainstream example, look at call of duty. Everything up to and including cod4:mw came with the software to run your own server. nothing after it did, though a few let you 'run your own server' by paying their approved hosting provider to run a copy for you, but it was always under their control and not something you could just set up on hardware you already have.

i bring you, the incredible concept of a dedicated server.

A few games, small ones, like minecraft, have discovered that you can just release a server binary, and people will figure everything else out, regardless of whether or not you document anything, or tell anybody how to do anything.

Even if you have a huge MMO with a centralized server, i see no reason you shouldn't have a dedicated server infrastructure.