alt Hacker News> Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture.
Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.
Among Us was literally a three-person team.
[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.
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Agreed, I'm pretty much doing the same thing for my indie game
It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish
Among Us is also incredibly simple compared to the services required to support some AAA games and even then, their networking code was riddled with exploits that no professional would have written, including RCEs.
Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.
A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.