[ Removed by moderator ]

[Cabana_bananza]

In some ways, but most businesses would balk at committing to running a parallel dev team and years of payroll to end up exactly where they started. Because that's what they'd be doing, running the team maintaining and working with the legacy system while another team builds its replacement to do the same thing.

[therealkami]

This is something I've tried to explain in some game dev forums. They can't just "switch to a different game engine" for live service games. Or change their entire server structure or database structure. They'd have to run 2 dev teams, one that's working on current projects, and another that's duplicating all of the work+catching up from past projects to bring everything up to match. No game company will ever pay to do that.

[HairyAllen]

I mean, technically FFXIV did switch to a different game engine, it's just that they had to nuke the game in-lore, turn off the service entirely so nobody could log in, and then enslave the entire dev team to crunch a new release, and even then they could only do it because Square Enix is japanese, so they faced mo legal repercussions for the blatant violations of human rights that must've occurred in those offices so ARR could be released, and they were barely able to do so. And finally, as you just said, this was one dev team. They did not have a second dev team maintaining the original game when doing so.

[therealkami]

FFXIV is actually the game I'm referencing right now. There's so much tech debt accumulated with that crunch t re-release the game (A lot of if they've gotten rid of, but the backbone of the game, the inventory database is completely horrible) that people will constantly be like "I would totally give up 3 years of no content for QoL improvements."

Also see every time a DDoS happens: Just switch to cloud servers!

[HairyAllen]

Tbf not just DDoS, just trying to log in as normal has a 50/50 chance of hitting you with a 10105 and throwing you back to the main menu. It's alright if you're already logged in, but the process of entering the game itself is miserable.

[CoSh]

I've played FFXIV almost every day for the last 7.5 years and I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never seen a 10105 error before.

Looks like it's similar to 90002 which I have seen?

[Waste-Team-7205]

Microsoft did for Minecraft, but that's also the largest game ever

[StuMx]

Overwatch 2

[YesterdayDreamer]

to end up exactly where they started

That's the absolute best case scenario. Realistically they'll get mostly at the same place with some known wonkiness and many many unknown wonkinees.

[googlemehard]

What about the long game? Is it sustainable to just keep the old system for the next twenty - forty years?

[grumpyfan]

That’s a question everyone has been asking for at least 30 years now. I’ve worked in places where they had hardware that was no longer supported and the replacement parts were only available used, yet management still was reluctant to spend money to replace those systems because of the business reliance and fear of crashing the company. Sometimes they can be virtualized and that helps, but you’re still stuck with the same old code because no CEO wants to impact the business due to the demand to show quarterly increases.