Online gaming is so convenient these days that LAN parties don't really exist. I feel like we sort of lost some of the culture of trying out new games with friends in the process, which was, let's face it, mostly enabled by piracy at LAN parties.
In a couple of friends circles/gaming communities I am a part of, we try to keep that tradition alive with semi-regular "Friday game nights" (not necessarily occurring on Fridays) and, for longer-term games, private servers, and the hardest part is always finding a game that 5-10 people actually own and want to play. For the obvious reason that people tend to not want to pay money for a game they will probably play exactly once, most of the games we end up playing are free-to-play titles and older titles with no DRM.
I feel like the Minecraft offline server thing strikes a pretty good balance here. It's inconvenient enough that it's very much inferior to actually buying the game (painful to install mods or even launch the game, servers get little in the way of user verification so cracked public servers are difficult to moderate, etc.), but is sufficient for LAN parties and private online games among friends.
As it stands, it's pretty difficult to convince people to try a niche indie title like Vintage Story ("looks like minecraft? no thanks, i don't like minecraft i'm not twelve"), so I think some kind of try-before-you-buy solution would be beneficial to the game.