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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

You remember how we can still play 15 year old Ubisoft games without servers because they all added LAN? Pepperidge Farm remembers but on a serious note? what happened? why has everyone stopped adding LAN to their games? Why do I have to rely on shitty online only servers from game publishers who pull the rug on every game after 5-10 years. We need a new LAW that forces game companies to open source their games after 20 years and to add LAN to the game after 10 years. Making it unplayable should be unacceptable

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> Why do I have to rely on shitty online only servers from game publishers who pull the rug on every game after 5-10 years.

Because LAN (and dedicated servers, by effect) allows people to bypass the publishers servers, and makes it easy to still play multiplayer even though the game is "cracked" (DRM bypass).

Most game publishers do whatever they can to avoid making it feasible to play cracked games, even if some of the techniques they use hurt players who actually bought the game legally.

So? They have a bad argument for not including LAN, IMO.

Also, LAN parties.

This case is more egregious than not having LAN in a multiplayer game. The Crew has always online single-player, allegedly with an offline mode simply disabled.

my point is geared towards in general like The Crew is not the only game getting shut down, have you seen the list? https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/help/connectivity-and-performa... This happens every year and they make a dozen games unplayable every year. This should be ILLEGAL without providing a means

It should be, but the argument is a lot more clear for a game sold on its single-player mode being killed entirely like this. All of that list is "You will be unable to play multiplayer, link Ubisoft accounts in-game or use online features." There's no more multiplayer, and then there's no game at all.

AFAIK, anyone with an old disc of Assassin's Creed 2 for Xbox 360 will still be able to play the single-player this Thursday. A disc for The Crew will become just junk when the server is killed.

Digital purchasing has gutted consumer rights. Remember when you could sell your used games to other people? Someone buying a digital game/book/movie/album usually has few rights besides consuming the content in question, and even then only until the seller decides they don't want to host the content (or sometimes DRM servers required to run it) anymore. Returns on digital purchases are often impossible (Steam being an exception) as are typical retail niceties like price matching against sales within the return period (e.g. you buy something and it goes on sale the next day).

I don't know what the solution is because a lot of these functions would require complex DRM systems to make a digital product behave anything like a physical one. So legislating to enforce digital consumer rights is effectively legislating for DRM everywhere. The crypto dream of tying every digital good to a token or NFT was effectively an implementation of this kind of DRM using blockchain. However many digital storefronts already implement complex DRM systems, so perhaps at least enforcing some kind of right to return digital goods (including game MTX) would be beneficial.

Just make it conditional: if you use DRM, then the customer also benefits:)

> why has everyone stopped adding LAN to their games?

Ultimately, for business reasons:

1. A good LAN-play UX requires game/host discovery; solutions involving network broadcast will only work in small (i.e. home) LAN environments where everyone is in the same broadcast-domain - but this won't work in larger networks, which then means players will need to manually type-in IP addresses (which is acceptable for IPv4, but less-so in IPv6). Using an internet-based matchmaking and host/game directory service eliminates this problem when, and thesedays it's incredibly unlikely that a user will have a LAN available without Internet access. Internet-disconnected LAN-parties haven't really been a thing since ~2005 (excepting military/naval/antarctic scenarios) so the business-case just isn't there.

2. Providing technical support for games costs money; speaking from my second-hand experience with a major console game publisher: when a (console) game features LAN-play (with discovery/broadcast/manual-IP-addresses) it's inevitable the company will receive support calls/tickets from people having issues with their home networks that the company can't really do anything about; even if there's an explicit warning to users that the game's technical support team won't assist with local network problems they'll still receive those calls and need to triage (and reject) them, which all costs money.

3. The vast majority of a game's players aren't interested in such a feature; so when a game has a dev budget, it's just good business-sense to spend that budget on things that bring the most revenue, such as fixing bugs/glitches (which directly lead to bad IGN review scores and purchases legitimately demanding costly refunds) instead of netplay features (and omitting LAN-play isn't going to lose them that many potential customers; I suspect no-one already in the market for a AAA game is going to not buy it solely for that reason alone).

I've been at the Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition release event in Berlin. It was held at a Microsoft store with German YouTubers. Head of European Marketing for Xbox was there as well.

They couldn't play a multiplayer game because right at release, the servers were overloaded and the new version did not have a LAN mode at launch.

The whole purpose of the event was to have a kind of LAN / multiplayer gaming with the community and stream it.

They added a LAN server, and it's broken as it stands today. (Tried to play a LAN game with my brother and sister two weeks ago.)

It's broken and they don't seem to care, which is a huge shame.

Money, money, money. Adding LAN competes with the service based, battle pass, micro-transaction model that rakes in the moolah.

There is absolutely zero incentive to add LAN to a game early, mid, or late stage. It does nothing but cost money and reduce profit margins.

As such, you will almost never see it on any large scale service oriented multiplayer game.

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