what I just outlined as what would have to happen.

The backend server stack hosts a set of tightly intertwined services that conform to an Application Programming Interface. You quite literally do not need to provide the entire stack designed for multi-hundred-thousand concurrent players just to satisfy that interface the game clients are expecting. It costs time and money, but they could damn well just create an implementation designed for simpler, small-scale hosting.

Oh yeah, just do that, as if that's a super duper easy task to do.

If you designed it for that eventuality, yeah, it's easy to do. Trying to retrofit that into an existing system designed solely to run at cloud scale is a bloody nightmare, and that's not at all what SKG is asking for.

because "direct connection" means no concept of an account anymore, and if everything is tied to your account, the whole damn game doesn't work now.

Counterexample: private World of Warcraft servers. They implemented their own, and it's worked fine for them.

The account system is just another API. The client uses it to authenticate, and the dedicated server uses it to verify the client authentication. Fuck, even Minecraft and it's poorly-designed multiplayer can do that. As long as the client and server use the same auth provider, you can still have "accounts" without relying on Mojang's insanely censorship-happy official login system.

It's possible, sure, but by this point you've effectively remade a very large amount of the game from scratch so who cares now.

I've made this exact same argument you're giving here, and yeah, I know it's not easy. I sympathize with indie developers who are over-designing their server architecture and might not have the resources to do this, but a AAA game studio can afford to hire more developers for their next game instead of C-suite bonuses.

what if parts of that executable have still in use proprietary pieces that are used in other games they own?

I also made this argument before, and it is valid criticism. It's worth pointing out that the valuable and reusable proprietary parts are the infrastructure and design, not the game logic.

I'm not an entitled twat. I understand that there are legal challenges and big, open-ended questions on how developers could actually pull this off. Making large, consumer-exploitative developers like Epic, Bungie, or Blizzard have to hire more developers isn't a good enough reason to make me discount an entire consumer-rights movement.