Leaderboards and such could still be kept along with high multiplayer count.

It might not be as ‘unified’ as a traditional live service, but it’s totally feasible.

As long as they actually let you run a server its fairly easy to self host and there are plenty of services that let you rent professional grade systems with enough data and hardware to handle tons of players.

I think it was maybe last week or the week before there was a thread about plex enshitification and I recall a lot of downvotes to folks praising/recommending jellyfin over plex.

Yeah, I had/have problems with Jellyfin transcoding too.

Basically transcoding things that didn’t need it and wouldn’t transcode things that did need it.