What is the point here, really? To re-emphasize, most games had built in microphone and team chat support since forever, and if you wanted party chat even skype had you covered for free, teamviewer was free etc. I never once had to pay for a server to play/speak online on PC. Such a cost does not exist unless you want a professional clan server or something.
Back in the old old days, you didn't have that much choice if you had a large guild, like say during EQ/vanilla wow days. You could get free Teamspeak/ventrilo servers but there were limited in slots and you generally had to pay for a bigger servers and kinda had to if you want to do 40man raids+subs in wow or 80+man raids in EQ. I think Roger Wilco(somehow remembered that name as I was typing this, even though I haven't heard about it in like 20years, like ICQ) was free but had a bunch of other issues. Eventually there were better solutions and it became irrelevant, especially nowadays, both because almost everything is free and because games don't have 40 people in the same raid anymore anyway(well other than Wildstar, but that didn't work out too well for them).
The costs were really low though and split amongst guildmates or whatever, so you'd end up paying maybe a dollar, but most likely one guy just bought it for the whole guild/group of guilds on the server and you split it in different rooms for each guilds and such.
Still the whole thing is fairly interesting. Nowadays you can still play F2P mmos and such on PC that have integrated voice chat and obviously a bunch of online traffic to pay for and you don't pay an additional fee other than your internet connection, but playing similar, or literally the same game on PS4/Xbox One requires an additional cost, because, reasons? And when those servers go down because some kids are bored during holidays, you can't play anything, even if the specific servers of the game you're playing aren't down.
I'd like to say it's one of the reasons I don't play multiplayer games on consoles, but while it ensures I won't ever, it's not really the leading reason for me, so I'm not particularily angry or annoyed at the whole system. And there are some good things that come out of this, kinda, like how you can stream/make videos out of your games without having to upload your stuff somewhere first and can share photos and what not. And you still get the free games every month, although from what I've read the quality on these has gone way down over the years so people have been complaining a lot.