pouët.net

Well, you only need one ball and one net for tennis. half life could be played by 8 players with one cd key over LAN. Nowadays with widely available broadband, LAN is hardly a killer argument in business economic terms. Some multiplayer game or the multiplayer part of a game can get released for free, to keep it alive, when the game is dying, like F.E.A.R., QuakeLive or TF2, but thats either really considdered and not the standard or a tactical move. battle field had 2 (mediocre) free releases in the series, possibly to keep the interest in the series alive.

@vectory: +4 insightful :)



not everything has to be an economic killer argument, does it ? :)

games are/should be designed to be as fun as possible. locally sharing a game that can easily picked up by everyone over pizza and beer for a few hours seems like fun to me. unless that is possible, people have to be either rich (or very dedicated to a particular game), resort to warez, or simply forget about it.

adding that kind of "guest"/"split screen" feature to games that have netcode already would not be a large burden on behalf of the developers, I presume. (and as already implied, by far not every game is a candidate for this)

leaving the guests with a playable, yet heavily stripped down demo version after the party is over yet could have an economic impact (but not a killer one, that's true) - at least some will buy their own license afterwards.

plus they've seen the game (and possibly spread the word)

a good way to save money is buying keys/serials from ebay or other online shops. the prices in steam/origin are imho completely insane...

RAGE paid 13€ / normally 50€ over steam
BF3 LE paid 33€ / normally 60€ over origin
Batman Arkham City paid 15€ / normally 50€ over steam
Saints Row 3 paid 18€ / normally 50€ over steam

I take it that you don't work for living?



Commercial games are made to bring a profit to the developer. That is the only reason why they exist and making the game fun is means to that end.



There's not much money to be made there nowadays, hence it does not happen with big commercial titles. I'm sure there's a lot of small budget/indie/freeware games that suit your needs well. I don't think many game developers would care at all if you play their game on a LAN or not.

Also note that with the advent of account-based gaming (i.e. MMOs or online leaderboards), you're not necessarily paying for the game itself.

Sometimes the situation is in between the two extremes. For instance, Magicka (hilarious multiplayer game, btw) requires each player to buy the base game, but to play on a map acquired through an expansion pack, only the player running the server needs to buy that expansion pack.

Yeah, imagine my surprise when I wanted to try the game with some friends and his wizard appeared with an AK47 and a combat helmet :D

How utterly irrelevant :)

To return to the original question: what now? Buy one copy. Nobody cares. As someone already pointed out, LAN is very low on the radar nowadays.

In a perfect world we would all live in castles and drink the best champagne for breakfast every day!

@4kum4: I usually buy old games. Just picked up the HL2 orange box for 10 bucks (on Steam it's still 19 euros). Most of the games in my PS2 collection are either Platinum editions or second-hand.

@Preacher: That's just cute - how many times have I seen that kind of response when someone asks for a (minor) feature - "you must be living on social services" or "do it yourself" (if it's open source) ;) Let me assure you that I do work for a living (in the SW industry). At one point I even worked as a gamedev myself but figured that other jobs are less stressful and pay better. I could not imagine to work in one of the major-league sweat shops where 60-80 hours a week seem to be common, entire teams are laid off immediately after release and the road to the gold master seems more like a death march than a steady marathon. For me that would kill all passion I have for game programming. Btw, I hope your situation has improved. Last time we exchanged emails (~2 years ago) you said that you were under a lot of pressure.. I still appreciate that despite all that you still found the time to write a long and friendly mail (and no, that demo tool is still just a concept, lazy me!) and yes, indie gamedevs are probably more likely to pick up a concept like this (local game sharing).

@the situation: what a surprise, it's the last option. to quote myself: "simply forget about it" :P

@okkie: don't know about ideal worlds but in a better world there would be a lot less exploitation, we would all share information, wealth and resources (with some room for capitalism but not the kind of turbo-capitalism that rules the world now). workflow optimizations would benefit the employees instead of costing them their jobs (or making them work even harder). in my book, for one entity (person, company, state) to become extra-ordinarily rich, (many) other entities have to sacrifice their wealth to an extent that borders on unfair. but hey! I know that's not going to change any time soon, I am just yapping :D (besides, I would still drink coffee and water even if I could afford the champagne;) a bouncy castle would be nice, though!)

And trees would be pink and rain would be beer. Buy play done.