In cost of the game itself for sure, but then you'd have costlier price in the disc too.
With the discs the scratches and storage were a bitch of a problem and later games even needed internet connection to activate games running on disc. It had pros but wasn't all rosy either.
I can only find an option to block the community, not the instance. Blocking|hiding communities individually is tedious when you're trying to personalize your feed
Everything else has a huge dependency on environmental factors (wind, sunlight, water) or storage resources which are harmful to scale up without safety consideration.
It would be super helpful if we can hide entire instances from showing up at an individual level. For e.g. I see a lot of posts from feddit.de - I don't have anything bad against the server or the users, but the posts there add no value to my experience and fill up my feed with content I'll simply not understand. It would be a better UX to be able to hide these without having the home instance and other users on it be affected by your preference.
If they'd done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
More realistically, a lot of Devs would've never have chosen it, thereby not having it to become as popular as it is today. Something else would've taken its place, simple.