alt Hacker NewsAh, I see. Well, the post I was responding to reads to me like a denial of the existence of games like Among Us when it says it wouldn't affect three person dev teams making games on a shoestring budget, and gives off the weird implication that it would only affect big budget games.
That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.
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A simple multiplayer game like Among Us would also have a similarly simple server. There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start. In concept, the gameplay is no different from a deathmatch game in, say, Quake 3 Arena. It's a small group of players sharing a level and interacting with each other in various ways.
I've also worked on MMOs and the architectures there can get quite hairy, particularly when they're deeply plumbed into shared services and infrastructure that they couldn't operate without. Those layers occasionally have closed-source licensed tech mixed in there.
Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.
I've also contributed to game server emulation (pre-professionally) to keep them alive, so preserving games is a cause I support, even if I don't think it's necessarily always going to be trivial.