Right. The same thing happened with Spatial OS from Improbable, a back-end system for big-world MMOs. They announced a deal with Google where you have to host on Google's servers. Expensively. The AAA title people then totally lost interest, and two of the major indy games shut down. The Worlds Adrift people wrote: "The network of Worlds Adrift is built on top of SpatialOS, a proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside of SpatialOS’s infrastructure. This requirement prevents us from making it P2P or allowing players to host their own servers."

In China you can now run Spatial OS on Tencent Cloud. The Nostos MMO from NetEase in China takes that route. You can play it from outside China. So you can now go with the other evil empire.

(There's Sominium Space, though. It's a big virtual world based on cryptocurrency speculation in virtual land. With in-world advertising. Really. That uses Spatial OS and Google servers. Not clear how that will work out. Land and in-world items are really expensive.)