Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

I frequently play Age of Empires 2 with my wife and her brother. Remarkably, this game still supports LAN play in 2025, even though the netcode has been completely overhauled since 1999.

However, we decided to try it on a recent flight, and it turns out it still requires an internet connection, both to satisfy Steam, and to connect to some sort of LAN coordination server. I ended up paying $20 for in-flight wifi.

We've lost a lot in the last 30 years, but tech like wifi aware might help bring back local-first networking. I choose to believe that if solid APIs exist, developers will use them.

> and to connect to some sort of LAN

this is actually kind of a hard UI/UX problem for game developers

many p2p+local auto recovery protocols are very bothersome, partially due to some of the protocols being bad or incomplete and a lot due to all kind of hardware & OSs partially or fully crippling them

so game devs often have to fall back to a coordinator server to provide reliable and easy to use functionality for most which also happens to often be the easiest thing to implement and maintain, and then in addition they could also implement work-arounds for the no-internet case

but that is additional cost for a overall niche use case (local co-op without internet), so it ends up in the backlog with low priority at best or gets outright killed. To make that worse steam provides tools to make it much easier to implement co-op (focused on non local co-op), and the easiest way to use them is in a way which always requires internet even for local co-op

so as long as steam doesn't put in a lot of work to make no-internet local co-op close to free to implement for most games it will never happen for most games