Obviously, I like the feature, but I believe I want every game I work on to be able to outlast my company and me. Many of the games I grew up on (OpenTTD, XCOM, etc...) have become community projects. I continue to strongly believe this is central to making a great game, and I have erred greatly in the past (DayZ Standalone) in not going quickly towards supporting communities within our games.
The convience of the feature was great, and I like, it, however:
1. When we made the decision to store prospect data on the basis of game time, instead of real world time, this means we now hold data far longer than we intended too.
2. We then made the decision to include the entire Olympus outpost as a prospect, vastly increasing further the data for a prospect.
3. We allow (behind the scenes) for an arbitrary amount of characters, the three character limit is simply applied at the UI level. With the number of general re-live events we have done, this means there are significant amounts more character data than might be expected.
This has placed great strain on what was already a complex solution.
The "game as a service" model relies on continued funding sources for the game. I will not add additional priced content to the game until I am satisfied with the product, and as such, the product needs to adapt
The strains we placed on the system have been evident with the outages. Not only are these disruptive to the community; they result in our staff being called in on weekends. For the past four weekends key staff (including myself) have been called out, often at the middle of the night, and worked through the weekend. This is not sustainable. This follows on from a complex time post beta, where to build confidence we committed to continuing to provide updates every single week, without a break, including through the Christmas period.
I believe strongly, both as a consumer and a game developer, that games should be made with a long term beyond end of life focus. Given we have such a strong community, and absent a sensible reason - it is unconscionable for me to support us running the game as a closed "game as a service".
We must provided the tools, mechanisms, and systems necessary for the game to develop it's own communities. We have done some amazing things with the game, and we have made some "amazing" mistakes. But our desire to hand the game over to the community, despite the small loss in functionality, is not one of those mistakes.
I must confess, it saddens me somewhat that we as customers have grown so accustomed to developers locking their games behind the "game as a service" model; that we embrace it. This is how games die.
Even if only one person out there is enjoying the game, I want them to be able to play it - no matter for the fortunes of myself, the studio - or Valve.
I have made it clear to all at the studio, we will decentralize out games, we will make dedicated servers available for our games, and we will remove all the DRM from all of them. This is non-negotiable for me, I feel very passionate about it
One of the recent things we have done is completely remove the requirement for Stationeers to rely on steam, by running our own lobby management server and allowing our customers to point the game to their own central servers if they so wish. We are redoing their save files, to continue to allow our customers to edit those files.
I am not sure that this is a "sensible" policy for making money. But I would rather be broke and make games for free, than lock them away again. If I had my way, I would put deadmans switches to release all source code for all my games.
I understand the frustration, but I am sorry - I have thought long and hard about these issues. I am passionate and resolute now about making games that can sustain communities long after the studio ends.
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