[Anamon]

These problems had been solved for a long time before publishers decided to needlessly kill self-hosted multiplayer. Don't let them gaslight you into believing that the online requirements are about anything else but their greed.

Also, I'm pretty sure players still know each other's IP addresses these days. I don't have any insider knowledge about this, but I'd be very surprised if today's multiplayer games took the latency hit of funneling actual game state through their servers, rather than just using them for matchmaking.

[29athrowaway]

There's also the problem of cheating which creates a reputational issue for the game and frustrates players. Many multiplayer games suffer from cheating.