‘Doom’ creator wants devs to avoid shutting down games, following a number of high-profile closures

6 February, 2023

Ultimate Doom

Doom co-creator John Carmack has warned companies against shutting down games, following the news of several high-profile closures.

Last week, Fortnite publisher Epic Games put out a statement confirming “brawler royale” Rumbleverse was set to shut down six months after it launched while PvP dodgeball title Knockout City announced it was set to go offline forever this summer.

Ahead of announcing it had lost almost £3.5billion on various metaverse-related projects in the fourth quarter of 2022, Meta announced that hugely popular VR title Echo VR would also be shutting down.

Now Doom co-creator and former Meta employee John Carmack has shared a lengthy statement about the importance of video game preservation with UploadVR.

“I believe in saving everything,” starts Carmack. “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.”

He then went on to suggest numerous alternative options for developers instead of simply killing a game, including having it exist as an “unsupported” game, open source the project or having a sole developer in charge of maintaining the title.

“At id Software, we had one guy managing Quake Live for a long time, and I think that was the right thing to do. This would almost certainly not “earn out” on a cost benefit analysis for Echo, but a lot of people are spent on worse things, and despite me always harping about efficiency, I would consider it justified for the intangibles,” writes Carmack.

id Software
Quake. Credit: id Software

“While this is foremost a business problem, there are still technical plays that can help in the future, and I encourage everyone, in and out of Meta, to think about them,” he continued. ”Every game should make sure they still work at some level without central server support. Even when not looking at end of life concerns, being able to work when the internet is down is valuable.”

He added: “Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making the project open source. Think twice before adding dependencies that you can’t redistribute, and consider testing with stubbed out versions of the things you do use. Don’t do things in your code that wouldn’t be acceptable for the whole world to see.”

“Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicated time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development.”

John Carmack left his role as consulting chief technology officer at Meta at the end of 2022. “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugarcoat this; I think our organisation is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy,” he wrote in a goodbye statement. 

In January, the company announced plans to end support for the original Quest VR headset.

In other news, After a turbulent start to 2023 The Day Before is now being accused of ripping off games like Call Of Duty, The Last Of Us and Tom Clancy’s The Division.

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