If they’re self-hostable, they cease to be live services. And I’m just fine with that. I have no problem completely ignoring live services as a customer, but the problem I do have is how much research it takes to find out if a game I’m interested in is built to last or otherwise respects my values. Every Borderlands game has LAN multiplayer except for the GOTY edition of the first game, and even then, you can still acquire the regular edition of that game that still has it. Meanwhile, Hitman, a single player game, locks a lot of its best stuff behind an arbitrary server connection; the community has made pirate server executables to replace it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to reward IO Interactive with my dollars for that design decision.

why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years?

I ask people this every time they put time and money into a new live service game. I was referred to this community when I went down a self-hosted VPN rabbit hole for old LAN games whose multiplayer will never die.

He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.