Comment by knollimar

So do games just have to have a perpetual endowment to fund any shared component costs? This seems like a logical conclusion. You wouldn't get scalability from reuse (e.g. reusing an auth library).

Or what's likely cheaper is budgeting for that patch in the game.

You may bemoan "oh they just don't want to release the auth service", but it functionally shuffles the cost math.

I'd personally rather the 5% cheaper games than trying to play a multiplayer only game 20 years later wtih 6 people on the server.