>I'm sure there is a very blunt reason this isn't the case, but
>it made sense to me at the time.

I mean right now for 95% of all online games one of the consoles serves as the server anyway for the actual gameplay; outside of matchmaking, basic communication connectivity and feeding minor info (achievements! scores!) to a mother brain a PSN or Xbox Live isn't needed. But PSN/Xbox Live serves to peddle you products *shrug*.

It's imho one of the biggest things we allowed the companies to take away from us. Ten years ago a company would release a game, fans would throw up their OWN computers as servers, and a community would live on until the last person decided to take theirs off line...there's still hella QUAKE servers alive. We won't even get into the developers being able to easily patch and continually upgrade their product easily. We've pretty much given up all our power just to be able to cross chat and have achievements.