Doesn't Minecraft have its own controversies with Microsoft imposing various forms of direct control over ostensibly private servers? Anyway it's obviously a special case regardless because of the unusually expansive modding community. It's hypothetically possible for games to have a private server friendly business model, but the trend has been for the biggest successes to have a freemium business model which arguably would make less money if they offered private servers (because people would use them as a way to avoid the exploitative bullshit the game is trying to profit from).

Not to say that such a requirement would be bad for videogames. It's just clearly a much bigger fight if companies have reason to believe a law is a potential financial threat to them, and they would have much more reason to think that with a private server requirement that isn't limited to EOL games.

Right. It can and has been done before while still turning a profit. People can, did, and still do use self-hosting as a way to play things for free. It has never been the reason for why a game failed financially, though. Most people just don't have the knowledge or the interest to go through the extra steps required to play for free. A lot of them buy things because they genuinely wanted to support the developers.

The abuse is the point. The people in charge spend every day figuring out more ways to take power away from people and give it to the corporation. It's an art and a science at this point.