Dev Tracker - Discussion

"The game's success has forced us to update our long-term goals for the project yet again..."

The hell is this supposed to mean?

Isn't it obvious? They had no intention of this going for so long. Players kept it alive. They never could have projected this kind of long term success, especially with as little effort they've put into the game the past decade. Their roadmaps are 1-2 years worth of a budget because they don't even expect it to continue as strong beyond that.

Translation:

"We weren't expecting to still be profitable a quarter century later, and were hoping this project died a decade ago so we could write this off as a bonus for one of the executives and move on. But y'all kept subscribing even after we banned thousands of your accounts, blocked certain servers, and made the game unenjoyable. You guys simply won't move on no matter how hard we try to encourage you to do so, so fine, we'll keep this going a bit longer since it's free money for decade's old technology and pennies to maintain."

They have said they were expecting to be "final maintenance mode" after both RoV and TVR, so yeah, it's genuinely the skeptical interpretation here.

And don't get me wrong, they are clearly happy about it! The individual humans working on XI like it! But.