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> Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I get

by cced 6y ago

> Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I getting this wrong, or are patches and such deployed without a game recompile?

kroltan 6y ago
Maybe for the first year or two, but many many games are pretty much untouched after that, even though there is a long tail of players still buying and playing them. And yes, many expansions and additional content are usually data-driven, so it might not require a recompile.
Danieru 6y ago
Updates are planned, and more and more games get longer support periods. Still majority of games stop getting updates within a year. Every game is different, but for every Subnautica with 5+ years of active development post initial sale you'll get a bunch of successful games and only marginal updates for 2 months. For my next game, Railgrade, I am planning a couple years of updates, but even that will be dwarfed by the long tail years of continued sales after updates are done. I expect Railgrade to be on the market for 5+ years. For consoles it should be purchase-able for at least a decade until Nintendo shuts down the eShop. Then it should continue being playable for decades more. At some point emulators will take over and my effort can keep bringing players joy for eons more. I am not interested in Apple's "expiring" model of art.
- stuart78 6y ago
  Railgrade looks very cool, look forward to checking it out.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Games eventually stop getting updates. They're proprietaty software so they're always in danger of becoming incompatible with newer systems. This is true even on Windows: older games regularly fail to work on Windows 10 in my experience and many didn't recover after hunting down the missing DirectX stuff. It's gonna be ironic if Wine becomes the best way to play these games one day. In a way, this is the whole point of the emulation community. Proprietary software was developed for really old systems and they don't work on modern computers. The old systems had to be emulated as virtual machines on top of which the old software could run.

by cced 6y ago

kroltan 6y ago

Maybe for the first year or two, but many many games are pretty much untouched after that, even though there is a long tail of players still buying and playing them. And yes, many expansions and additional content are usually data-driven, so it might not require a recompile.

Danieru 6y ago

Updates are planned, and more and more games get longer support periods. Still majority of games stop getting updates within a year. Every game is different, but for every Subnautica with 5+ years of active development post initial sale you'll get a bunch of successful games and only marginal updates for 2 months. For my next game, Railgrade, I am planning a couple years of updates, but even that will be dwarfed by the long tail years of continued sales after updates are done. I expect Railgrade to be on the market for 5+ years. For consoles it should be purchase-able for at least a decade until Nintendo shuts down the eShop. Then it should continue being playable for decades more. At some point emulators will take over and my effort can keep bringing players joy for eons more. I am not interested in Apple's "expiring" model of art.

stuart78 6y ago
Railgrade looks very cool, look forward to checking it out.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Games eventually stop getting updates. They're proprietaty software so they're always in danger of becoming incompatible with newer systems. This is true even on Windows: older games regularly fail to work on Windows 10 in my experience and many didn't recover after hunting down the missing DirectX stuff. It's gonna be ironic if Wine becomes the best way to play these games one day. In a way, this is the whole point of the emulation community. Proprietary software was developed for really old systems and they don't work on modern computers. The old systems had to be emulated as virtual machines on top of which the old software could run.