Quantonium's stance on Stop Killing Games

From the ground up, we are working towards making The Laser Games enjoyable beyond its development cycle, with built in singleplayer and dedicated server support. Even with this open nature, there are still many considerations when releasing software intended to extend the life of a game.

Quantonium LLC is committed to the Stop Killing Games movement, seeking not only to support the idea, but strive to be an example for new and old game companies, to help provide a realistic view on the process to keep a game from dying off past development.

 Stop Killing Games (SKG) is a worldwide movement seeking to enact policy preventing video game companies from intentionally killing off their own games, making them unplayable despite the core gameplay not requiring network functionality. Read more about the movement and its opinions on the website linked previously.

 SKG has good intentions, but from a surface level view of the movement it can seem apparent that the movement is being dictated by players, while affecting companies. Without a proper perspective on the development and decision processes in game studios, SKG can end up creating conflicts between ideal, pro-consumer actions, and reality in the industry. On one hand, the movement could fail due to publishing and development companies having ties with government entities, seeking to cancel the movement in favor of maintaining existing development practices; on the other hand, the movement could force significant changes to development practices, such that they contribute unprecedented costs and create new confusion in industry.

The ideal solution would be a middle ground- either new policy would be designed to work with most existing development practices, or clear procedures could be defined to assist with transitioning development practices and minimizing risk and cost.

In light of the Stop Killing Games movement, we will aim to developing and sharing internal pipelines oriented to long-term and post-development support of our games- our current in-development game The Laser Games, and our smaller mobile/PC game jam game One Touch Defender. SKG discusses wanting companies to implement a plan for post-development support, and as such we will begin by preparing one such plan for The Laser Games. We will seek to go beyond simply making the game playable, analyzing, for the case when the game is no longer developed, potential risks with the gameplay quality and cosmetic items planned for the game.

As for One Touch Defender, as a game officially past its development cycle, we will be discussing plans to ensure the game's long-term playability. One challenge with this game is its presents on the Google Play Store- by design, and under the arguably false claim of improved security, the Play Store requires apps to be constantly updated, or else Google will permanently close the app, preventing it from being installable and updatable again. CEO Andrew Herbert, on behalf of Quantonium, criticizes Google for this behavior, demanding a policy change allowing for the archival of apps on their app store. Quantonium will discuss additionally plans for long term support of One Touch Defender, and demands for policy changes for Google to conform better with the idea of the SKG movement.

Quantonium and the Stop Killing Games movement can be further discussed over at https://quantonium.net/discord. We will begin drafting our plans for long-term support of our games, and hope to share an update within the next few weeks.