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Comment by eindiran | Hacker News Reader

I think a big part of that is that historically most games are updated relatively little after they are released, so maintainability of the code base is secondary to not letting the release date slip. But Factorio is a game that has been getting updates for a while now post-release, so the devs have to be happy revisiting the code, which increases the incentives for keeping the code maintainable and the code health high. It seems like more games are moving towards this model (lots of updates post-release), so I'd expect to see the game industry start to adopt some of the practices used by the software industry in general to keep code maintainable.

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FYI factorio is still in early access. It hasn't been released. However it's so stable that everyone forget it.

It's possibly the most playable and stable early release game ever. I've been playing this game without crashes for something like 5 years now.

That is a chicken-and-egg problem though. One major reason that most games don't get updates is surely because the code is unmaintainable.

I think rather it's a revenue issue, until relatively recently there was no way to profit from updated games, so you're better off moving on to the sequel, or next year's edition of the game. Also a lot of the video game development culture likely stems from console releases, which again until "recently" could not be updated (only new versions of disks/carts for future customers) so it was not feasible to plan for future maintenance, beyond what was necessary for derived codebases.

it's a hit driven industry, so maybe the dynamics are pretty startup-ish: you don't know if the product is going to take off, so cut corners to reduce costs in the short run at the expense of future maintainability, since you don't know if the product will be profitable and have a future until after it ships.

if the product is wildly successful and has a future, but is a bit of maintenance nightmare: congratulations, that's the problem you want to have

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