LAN multiplayer is the cloud feature gap nobody talks about

Six people show up to a friend's house with laptops. They connect to the same WiFi and play CS, Age of Empires, StarCraft, or Minecraft together on a local network. No internet required, no central server, no latency to a data centre. The latency is whatever the local WiFi delivers — typically 2-5 ms.

LAN play was the social glue of PC gaming culture for decades. It's still alive in some communities (Smash Bros tournaments, fighting game locals, retro emulation parties) but has shrunk meaningfully as online play improved.

Cloud gaming sessions are individual user sessions. Each player connects to their own cloud GPU running their own game instance. The game instances communicate through the publisher's matchmaking servers, not through the local network.

Six players in the same room on six cloud sessions don't play on the LAN — they play through six cloud-to-internet-to-publisher-server paths. The local network is irrelevant to the multiplayer connection.

The latency they experience is the cloud session latency plus the matchmaking server latency, which is worse than what they'd get on a LAN. The 'we're in the same room' social premium gets paid for by worse technical conditions.

Tournament locals. Fighting game tournaments depend on LAN setup. Cloud-played fighting games at a tournament would be a downgrade and would change the competitive dynamics enough that organizers don't allow it.

Game-night socials. Families and friend groups that play together in person. Cloud gaming means everyone needs their own subscription, their own cloud account, their own session. The friction is high.

Schools and after-school programs. We've discussed how cloud is useful for solo learning use cases. The group-play scenarios are uniformly worse on cloud than on local LAN.

Cloud gaming's architecture is fundamentally per-user. The cost structure depends on each user having their own session. A 'shared cloud session for LAN play' would require an entirely different product architecture and the economics don't work at consumer pricing.

Cloud gaming services have shown no interest in LAN-style play. The strategic posture is 'we're the solution for solo play; LAN play is a use case for local hardware'. This is partially honest and partially convenient.

Keep local hardware for group play. If your friend group does game nights, keep at least one capable local gaming setup in the rotation. Cloud is not the right tool for the moment when everyone shows up to play together.

This is one of the cases where the 'cloud replaces local hardware' meme is most wrong. Local hardware remains structurally better for in-person group play and that's not changing.