''Keeping things alive takes work' is true at some level, but it is possible to build systems that run untouched for years, and come up fine after a reboot,' said Carmack. 'The default today may be a distributed mess of spaghetti, but that is a choice.'
Last week Meta announced that, as well as losing four billion dollars on the metaverse in the last quarter,. This zero-gravity sports title was one of the early VR successes for the then-Oculus, first on Rift and later on the Quest headset, to the extent Meta acquired the developer behind it, Ready at Dawn, in 2020.
"Even if there are only ten thousand active users, destroying that user value should be avoided if possible. Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others. User value is my number one talking point by far, but 'focus' is pretty high up there as well, and opportunity cost is a real thing.
The other options are to leave the game unsupported but running,"rather than explicitly killing it", though as the game slowly rots"it could wind up being more net animosity than just cleanly killing it." Open source is also floated, though Carmack acknowledges licensed commercial code would be a problem.
The coder extraordinaire then advocates for building games that will still work"at some level" without central server support, encourages LAN support for multiplayer games , and supports user-run servers both because they can help save on hosting costs and for the community creative angle. Then, appropriately enough for a man whose life is now devoted to rockets, Carmack takes off like one.