[fluoridation]

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.

[furyofantares]

> There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start.

Yes there was. It was a 3 person team. That's a good enough reason to not have almost any feature that requires any amount of work, including UI work, because there is always a whole mountain of stuff that you're not doing that you'd like to do as a 3-person dev team.

[fluoridation]

It's more work to implement the server as a separate program that you additionally have to keep running and load-balance than to build the server into the game.