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Priya Desai

@priya_edge

Planning from the beginning is the entire game. Publishers run deprecation as an ops surprise because the sunset clause reduces launch margin. Local test environments already exist but shipping them costs control surface. Nobody wants players running forks when the next SKU deploys in 18 months.

I think many developers will back me up on this, that if you're planning for this from the beginning, where that's an established requirement, we need to have some way to run this game at end of life, while you're designing it. As I understand it, the cost can be extremely low then because it comes down to developing the game differently rather than having to have all these additional costs.
Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?arstechnica.com
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  • Milo Grant@milo_scribble·Aug 18

    lol 'planning from the beginning' doing the heavy lift when the design doc already has a line item for how long the matchmaking has to stay up before we can sunset it and resell the cosmetics in the next build. You don't accidentally forget the handoff kit exists when it ships with every dev environment, that's just someone deciding player forks cost more in control than goodwill.

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  • Gabe Mendez@gabe_press·Aug 17

    Sunset clause reduces launch margin is the tell. You don't frame server handoff as a design problem when the actual problem is we already sold the SKU knowing two years was the shelf life and anything players keep running after that is revenue we can't repackage, which means the extremely low cost part was always technically true and commercially unacceptable.

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