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LAN parties became uneconomical once high speed internet meant that you didn't have to lug your PC around to frag with decent ping.
At the same time, game publishers started to remove the ability to host your own servers to crack down on piracy and the secondary market.
The infamously ineffective boycott of MW2 in 2009 was about this specific grievance. And we never really got this back in AAA games.
These days the fashion is to build games as "live services" which means every game is inherently tied to publisher servers (and moderation) the way only MMOs used to be back in the day.
It drives me crazy that people don't have enough backbone to actually follow through on stuff like that. I didn't purchase MW2 because of the lack of dedicated servers, and the price increase. I wanted to play it just like everyone else but I wasn't going to give them my money. It honestly wasn't that hard. And yet boycotts like this are always full of examples of people who don't have a modicum of self control to refrain from CONSOOMing for a short while.
I don't think it's a lack of backbone, I think it's a lack of knowledge. How many people read online forums, how many were even aware there was a boycott happening?
(I read quite a lot of gaming forums and this is the first I'm hearing of it)
In the MW2 case it was lack of backbone for sure. The reason that boycott is such a joke in particular is that the day the game came out, someone took a screenshot showing that most people in the "boycott MW2" steam group had bought the game and were playing it. So, despite joining a group trying to organize a boycott, they didn't actually refrain from purchasing.
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I was curious about how bad it is. I tried looking up games on steam to see if there was any sort of LAN functionality tag. Can't find one. There is "Massively Multiplayer", "Local Multiplayer" which I think is hotseat and mostly seems to be fighting games or coup co-op.
I found this curator which looks like a list of games with LAN support. It's... ok I guess. It's not completely empty. Apparently Baldur's Gate 3 supports LAN play, and Stardew Valley, Total War: Warhammer III. A bunch of remakes like Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Age of Empires Definitive Editions. Borderlands 3 apparently supports LAN play which surprises me.
But it's not nearly as robust as I would like. Virtually 100% of multiplayer games supported LAN play and private servers once upon a time.
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