But if they let people set up independent servers they wouldn't be able to shut the game down and force everyone to play the sequel, bad business plan tbh
god I love videogames made with profit as their highest priority, can't wait to completely forget overwatch 2 exists in a few years

I miss dedicated server games because such servers would often run community made plug-ins/mods that changed the game experience and added new gamemodes without the need for updates from the developer.

My favorite TF2 plug-ins were Zombie Fortress and Fort Wars and both of these gamemodes died completely after matchmaking was added to TF2 because matchmaking only put you on official servers. So now, old community servers constantly bleed old players while new players never come in to fill the empty slots. Matchmaking is the worst thing to happen to online video games, especially now that so many games are live services that don't have mod support.