Updates

Modern games often get updates. This is particularly true of multiplayer games, but even primarily single-player games sometimes get additional content added, even before we get into patches that impact balance and fix bugs - Thankfully the days of having to input a series of POKE commands issued in a magazine to fix a collection of game-breaking bugs are long since gone. Some games that have content updates as opposed to simply bug fixing ones get regular, small, updates. Sea of Thieves, for example, releases monthly content updates. This can incentivise players to keep with a game for longer since due to the regular updates it can take longer for the game to start feeling repetitive and like you've done everything there is to do, but also can make the game feel exhausting to keep up with unless you have the time to dedicate 20-30 hours a week to play that one game while making the idea of coming back to the game after being away from it for a few months a truly daunting concept. Other games get less frequent, larger, updates. A recent example would be Mario Maker 2, which released it's second and final major update. The first came a little over 5 months after launch, with this one coming around five months after that. These can cause players who have drifted off to come back to the game while feeling like they're going to be on the same page as people who stuck with the game since it's all new to everyone but makes it easier for players to drift out of the game in the first place, and it can feel not worth the hassle of refamiliarizing yourself with a game you haven't played for a few months to start playing again, in some cases they almost feel like a whole new game which while enticing can easily wind up on a player's 'backlog'. Different games that can benefit from updates will have different ideal update schedules depending on the nature of the gameplay and how players interact with each other - and how necessary it is for a bunch of people to be playing at once, and it's likely there's not even a single ideal for any game, but different options that have different strengths and weaknesses. Options Even with minor updates that might improve the game generally, sometimes for specific things an older version of the game works better. For multiplayer-focused games, this isn't usually a great idea - splitting a community can kill a game, since it makes matchmaking harder with each branch of players - but for single-player focused games this is often fine. This applies to speedruns especially, where sometimes running two different versions of a game will be completely different experiences, and if the game doesn't provide the option to play on earlier versions things can get awkward. Games with user-generated content add another problem - Updates in Mario Maker 1 broke levels as even bug fixes could make some levels unbeatable. Mario Maker 2 addresses this issue simply by making updates local to the game - If a level is uploaded, and the game changes something about the way it handles pretty much anything, the level will still work based on how things used to be. Archival Issues Let's imagine a simple game - Turn-based, on your turn you roll a die and move that many spaces. The board is linear, and you do what the space you land on says, some of the spaces have you draw from a deck of cards and do what the card says. It's a fairly typical Victorian Race Game. In the first Update to the game, maybe the development team decided to add some more strategic play and replace the die roll with a hand of cards, each player having a card numbered from 1 to 6, and when their hand is empty they draw their hand again. Now, instead of rolling a die on your turn, you play a card. In the second update, since we now have a hand of cards, the development team decided to replace the deck of cards with a different deck of cards, designed to be placed into your hand and played as part of the process of playing out your hand before drawing it back after every card in it has been played once, and in the third update, they added branching paths to the board and perhaps also changed the goal a little so that you're collecting points as you go round the board and the winner is the player who collects the most points, with bonus points for reaching the end fast. Do you take a slower path that has more opportunity to score points on your path while collecting additional cards along the way, or race to the finish fast and hope to win from the points for doing so? Now let's imagine we're curating a museum. Which version of this game would we archive in our collection? There are four distinct versions of the game, and the latest version is so different it could be considered an entirely different game. We only have finite space, so archiving all four versions is out, and with it being a game archiving is only really useful if people are playing and even 2 versions of the game would reduce the likelihood any version of the game will have enough players available for visitors to experience. While this is a silly example, it's a problem with archiving games with a bunch of updates. Archive everything is impractical, intermittent versions might not be available, and if a game requires 100 players to function, are there really going to be 1000 players available, evenly distributed, to play 10 archived versions of the game? An archive of a game that can't be experienced is suboptimal at best. None of that is to say updates are a bad thing - they're often necessary - but they do have some weird consequences beyond the simple fact that they update the game to fix bugs and/or add content.