> 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?
Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I getting this wrong, or are patches and such deployed without a game recompile?
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.
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.
And yes, many expansions and additional content are usually data-driven, so it might not require a recompile.