> In the days before the internet was widespread, like mid-90s, there were actually multi-player games that worked over LANs, both IP and IPX. Somehow, people w

> In the days before the internet was widespread, like mid-90s, there were actually multi-player games that worked over LANs, both IP and IPX. Somehow, people were able to configure multiple computers to talk to each other with this funny numbers called "addresses" or something. In the scheme of things very few people were able to set this up. It's definitely unfortunate that so much software no longer works without a server component you dont control, but one of the major reasons for it is that the typical user can now do it because they don't have to set up the networking or understand much about it. A little later software companies realised they'd actually rather keep control and stopped distributing the server component at all.