I think there’s a sweet spot where you have interactions with a massive player base asynchronously and have more intimate synchronous play sessions with smaller groups of players. Supporting a RPG dungeon crawl with 16-32 players synchronously doesn’t create a huge tech burden for example, and offering the larger community global services like chat, marketplaces, guilds, fort building, etc which scale through external services retains the best parts of a massive player base in my opinion. That way you can guarantee polished/low-latency interactions for the active play sessions and not sacrifice overall quality as your community continues to grow. This model also works well in the economy of server management which can quickly become important if you have a fun game on your hands. 