I've been hosting a 40-60 person LAN party in San Diego for 16 years. Almost the same people ever year and we absolutely love it. We still have people who have moved away from San Diego coming from as far away as New York and Seattle.
We were just having this conversation last night and the consensus was that if you didn't "grow up" between 1995 and 2005. The concept of a LAN party is lost to you for several reasons already mentioned. But the one that is most responsible in my mind for LAN parties going the way of the dinosaur is simply this:
- DRM/Anti Piracy measures in games/No LAN support
This year introduced some of the biggest challanges we've ever faced when conducting a LAN. Steam offline mode being completely unreliable, *every single* game that people were interested in playing required you to have an internet connection (a monster one at that because people *always* forget to update their games or worse...steam before they come).
Automatic patching agents (Fuck you Blizzard) that use torrents constantly crushing the internet connection we have (10MB fiber at the prem), bandwidth throttling from the venue host (Holiday Inn), and more.
The only reason we still do it is to continue to meet with the people we play with online, foster friendships, talk shop, and catch up on each other's lives. I have 3 sons who grew up gaming and none of them has ever attended a LAN party. The Facebook generation consider "friends" to be anyone you meet online and hang out with, even though they never meet in real life. Which as a concept seems absurd to me but thats a different topic. The idea of gaming together in a local environment seems alien.
We'll continue to run our annual LAN as play games like CS1.5, UT2K, Doom2 and other LAN friendly games. As well as some unfriendly ones like BF3 and Blur, but if developers continue to squeeze the life out of LAN type events I don't see how they can continue unless you continually pitch it as a annual retro gaming and social event.
We were just having this conversation last night and the consensus was that if you didn't "grow up" between 1995 and 2005. The concept of a LAN party is lost to you for several reasons already mentioned. But the one that is most responsible in my mind for LAN parties going the way of the dinosaur is simply this:
- DRM/Anti Piracy measures in games/No LAN support
This year introduced some of the biggest challanges we've ever faced when conducting a LAN. Steam offline mode being completely unreliable, *every single* game that people were interested in playing required you to have an internet connection (a monster one at that because people *always* forget to update their games or worse...steam before they come).
Automatic patching agents (Fuck you Blizzard) that use torrents constantly crushing the internet connection we have (10MB fiber at the prem), bandwidth throttling from the venue host (Holiday Inn), and more.
The only reason we still do it is to continue to meet with the people we play with online, foster friendships, talk shop, and catch up on each other's lives. I have 3 sons who grew up gaming and none of them has ever attended a LAN party. The Facebook generation consider "friends" to be anyone you meet online and hang out with, even though they never meet in real life. Which as a concept seems absurd to me but thats a different topic. The idea of gaming together in a local environment seems alien.
We'll continue to run our annual LAN as play games like CS1.5, UT2K, Doom2 and other LAN friendly games. As well as some unfriendly ones like BF3 and Blur, but if developers continue to squeeze the life out of LAN type events I don't see how they can continue unless you continually pitch it as a annual retro gaming and social event.