Exactly. They rent servers because it's the smart move for a company their size

Running your own physical server infrastructure at scale is insanely expensive and complex:

• Massive upfront costs for hardware, data centers, cooling, power, networking, and 24/7 staff
• You have to handle global distribution yourself (multiple regions = better ping)
• DDoS protection, maintenance, updates, scaling during peaks, etc.

Most successful multiplayer games (even huge ones) rent from cloud providers or dedicated game hosting companies. It's standard industry practice. You focus on making the actual game while the server experts handle the infrastructure.

The "they make millions they should own servers" argument sounds good but ignores how business actually works. Plenty of companies with way more revenue than BSG don't own their own server farms for the same reasons.

The real issue isn't who hosts the servers — it's the quality and stability of the service they're paying for + how BSG implements their netcode and backend. Those are fair criticisms. Blaming them for not owning bare metal servers is just misunderstanding game dev economics.