https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/after-repo-kinda-blew-up-its-developer-asks-the-community-for-advice-on-how-to-make-matchmaking-lobbies/

They are apparently a small dev team and ... this is their first multiplayer game, ever.

So cutting them some slack is I think warranted.

They say they are considering making matchmaking lobbies as a feature... by which they presumably mean some kind of private servers?

I really don't know, 'matchmaking lobby' is an extremely broad term that could mean basically anything from self hosted servers... to rentable/configurable dedicated servers... ???

Apparently right now it is all centrally piped into their own servers, and is reliant on Steam invites to actually get people together into a session.

They say they are worries that if they add 'matchmaking lobbies', that introduces the problem of hackers... and to solve hackers, they would need an anticheat, which would break mods.

I... do not understand how that makes sense, there have been many multiplayer games with both mods and anticheat.

You could go with a less intrusive AC like VAC... it does work on many non source engine games, though I don't know what the liscensing costs would be... and then just integrate mods into the steam workshop?

Or some other AC solution, and have some other method of basically submitting mods for some kind of review and standardization with the AC... and then just also have an option for AC-off servers, so you could test your wip mods?

I guess we really have gotten to the point where modern devs just actually cannot fathom how mods and AC could work together.