Let’s not defederate from every corporate player. Some of them can probably respect reasonable rules of civility.
But fuck Meta. We already know how this plays out.
We know there’s a huge wave of hatred and misinformation incoming. We’ve seen it on their other platforms.
There’s a lot of gamers in this thread too young to remember how overloaded and miserable the free console game servers were.
Microsoft was like “chuck us like ~$5 per month and we will put up enough servers so the games are actually playable”. At the time, it was the best deal available for console gaming.
Honestly an argument could be made it was the most economical way to play online, in general, at the time. The console cost was subsidized, and the online servers were arguably at-cost, and you really only needed to buy one copy of Halo to join the fun.