> The issue is that the players themselves seem to think that the convenience of KLA (over running your own community, paying for your own servers, etc) outweighs the privacy risks.
That's not true and there isn't data to show it.
The reasons why support for community run servers have fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players chose one over the other and companies followed them".
Companies also recognized significant downsides for themselves of community run servers. When your online experience is in community run spaces, you expose your player base to experiences outside of your control. When you don't run your own server instances, you can't enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize the online experience of your game. A such, the choice was generally taken away from players to protect companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player preference.
That's not true and there isn't data to show it.
The reasons why support for community run servers have fallen by the wayside are more complicated than "players chose one over the other and companies followed them".
Companies also recognized significant downsides for themselves of community run servers. When your online experience is in community run spaces, you expose your player base to experiences outside of your control. When you don't run your own server instances, you can't enforce the cheating rules you want. These, among many other reason, make it harder and more risky to monetize the online experience of your game. A such, the choice was generally taken away from players to protect companies. This wasn't at all a pure reaction to player preference.