I just had a horrific thought, if AAA studios are retarded enough to go with 24/7 transcript monitoring of voice chat and kernel level access to people's PCs for anti-cheat, they are going to be retarded enough to start charging people money for the privilege of accessing moderated servers. One thing that's getting very noticeable with the discussion around matchmaking is the understandable complaining about cheating because of all the damn script kiddies running around that are in the matches every 5 seconds.
Will they do the intelligent thing of making private matches and servers more configurable and allow people to police their own content online freely? No, that's not how developers think silly, they're going to charge a monthly fee for multiplayer servers or alternatively and here's something far worse than that I'm thinking of. They're going to have different tiers of pricing where you'll have the standard free servers, maybe moderated servers depending on how much and then for the 'pros' they'll really talk this up too as part of their marketing to sucker in all the try hards into paying for it who will inevitably be paying for the staff of blue hairs and Indians who will check reports 24/7.
I'm fucking calling it, yes this is a fever dream but I'm convinced they will do this and they will milk normie gamers who will praise it. The reason I think this is because loads of normies already try to convince people to go onto the FaceIt third party app for Counter-Strike. Oh and as an added bonus they're probably going to make you link your real identity among other things to the more premium servers they will offer as an 'option'.
Multiplayer gaming solved you guys, enjoy your dystopian surveillance state :)
Nah. They know there's way too much resistance to direct subscription models in customers. You either need a monopoly (xblive or PSN subscriptions) or a life consuming juggernaut of a game (WoW/FFXIV). Everyone else knows they get way more custom with a subscriptionless but infinitely monetized incentivization model.
They might want to start making you pay for the anti cheat somehow, but it won't be a mandatory subscription.
That's where I think they'll go, it won't be 'mandatory' outright, but they'll do what AAA studios do and make the experience far more pleasant at least for normies when you go onto premium servers. Free servers will be barely moderated if at all and completely infested with hackers as they almost always are currently.
You want no hackers? Got to pay for it and have a bunch of staff monitoring you as well as submitting ID so you have a real name attached to your account. The normies will eat this up thinking it will be a huge net benefit to them and then they'll get banned for all sorts of silly shit or it will be some kind of overly complicated hellscape to navigate through. If the companies can ban hackers the second they see them because of the smaller playerbase spending more money, the normies will probably go for it.