> why has everyone stopped adding LAN to their games? Ultimately, for business reasons: 1. A good LAN-play UX requires game/host discovery; solutions involvin

> 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).