because there weren't many alternatives. Dropped calls or latency issues were simply the norm and accepted as a trade off for being able to play. The reason companies used to favor p2p was because it was cheaper for them to not run servers.
But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the user that they do.
Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p when resources matter doesn't check out.
It's a bad deal for the consumer, though. The complicated Netflix infrastructure is way more robust and stable than SMB+VLC, but I don't need to serve video to millions of people and maintain a complex and rotating streaming library with various publisher contracts determining what shows are available where. I just queue up a show.
Division of labor with companies hosting servers for online games makes sense until the servers go away and then what? No more Warcraft III ever, I guess, the servers are gone.
When we go in on centralization, we lose availability, privacy, and control. The services are more reliable from a technical sense but less reliable from a social sense.
But with people demanding more quality, richer content and consistent and stable connections p2p makes not much sense. Look at some Netflix blogs and how complex their infrastructure is geographically as well as in terms of hardware and software to deliver content at the cost to the user that they do.
Division of labor has made sense for hundreds of years and it will continue to do so for many more, the economics of p2p when resources matter doesn't check out.