The golden days of LAN parties are over, partly because of increased internet speeds and partly because most multiplayer games no longer use the same client-server model. But modern PCs are powerful and often easier to move nowadays as the small form factor is popular, so maybe it's time to revisit those LAN parties of yesteryear. Plus, you probably don't need a powerful server to host the games because almost any recent-ish PC will be more than enough. All you need to worry about is which games you're going to play.

Check to see if your Steam account

Many games will have dedicated server tools to make this easier

The awesome thing about having all our games digitally attached to Steam accounts is that many of them come with dedicated server tools that are also already attached to our accounts. A quick glance at my Steam Library shows I have 97 dedicated server tools from games like 7 Days to Die, ARMA 2, Assetto Corsa, my entire collection of Source engine titles, and even a couple of Call of Duty titles.

Then there are a ton of MMO games, some RTS, and Deathmatch servers— basically anything you'd want to play at a LAN party. These take a few minutes to download and install at modern broadband speeds and a few seconds to load, set a few basic settings and deploy so that your friends can connect to the dedicated server.

It's worth mentioning that you will want to set up a dedicated Steam account to host the servers. Once a server is running, you won't be able to connect to it from the same Steam account. If you can't see the server tools on the new Steam account, you can add the account to a Steam Family, and share the tools from your main account. You'll still be able to run the server on the second account and connect to it using the client on your main account.

Pretty much any hardware can be turned into a game server

Most gaming servers have modest specification needs

You might think you need a powerful PC to run a game server for LAN party use, but you'd be mistaken. Depending on the hardware, you could even run several servers at once, making even larger LAN parties able to stay occupied. But realistically, you won't have that many people in your house, so even a low-powered Raspberry Pi could host the server.

Take Counter-Strike 2 as a prime example. This is one of the best esports titles, and Valve still easily lets you host dedicated servers using SteamCMD. For Linux or Windows installs, you'll need a dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 33GB of disk space. If you prefer to run it in a Docker container, you'll need 40GB of disk space. Left 4 Dead 2 is another popular LAN favorite, and you'll need 2GB of RAM and 10GB of disk space.

You might not even need a second PC

You can run the server for many games on your gaming PC

Some game servers use so few system resources that you can easily run them on your gaming PC and keep the game running without issues. All games using the Source engine from Valve fit that bill, as do Minecraft, Terraria, and plenty of others. Some other games, like Rocket League, turn your game client into the server host when you set up a LAN game, so you don't even need to set up a dedicated server.Others, like Battlefield 5, spin up a server instance on EA's servers when you create a community server, so you're not even using any system resources for it. The only thing you need to worry about there is if your internet connection can support however many PCs are going to be playing, but it also means you don't have to have everyone in the same house to have a LAN event.

Most game server tools make it a simple task to turn any PC into a LAN server

Whether you're using a dedicated game server management tool or the server tools that many Steam games come packaged with, it's easy to turn an old PC into a game server for your enjoyment. The games that are built for LAN play also have inbuilt tools for finding the other computers on your LAN, like Counter-Strike 2's community browser, which has a LAN tab to search for the host server if you don't know its IP address offhand. All you need to figure out is which games you're going to play, and where you're going to fit everyone's PC.