When an online game goes offline for maintenance, what are they doing?

Zozano@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 121 points –

I can understand patch updates, but what else are the devs doing?

34

You are viewing a single comment

I don't disagree, but at the same time running a whole setup that is fully ready for hot swap live failover whenever you have maintenance tasks to do is potentially just not desirable when you have the option of just taking the environment down instead - after all, gamers are pretty much conditioned to expect it at this point

running a whole setup that is fully ready for hot swap live failover whenever you have maintenance tasks to do

This is basically "ready for production 101." It's even easier to run an entire service on a computer under a desk, but this isn't how you run stuff in production.

Even if it's "easier" in the short term, you'll be paying more for not being production-ready in the long term (and get a reputation for not having good uptime).

Yeah I feel you're widely overestimating the setup that's in place for smaller online games companies. We're not talking about Activision or some high-frequency fixed income trading firm here. "Give me something that people can play on that costs as close to nothing as possible" is usually the main driver