Warframe devs on preserving always-online games: "we improve it or replace it with something better"

The Stop Killing Games campaign has pushed a real question to the front of the industry's mind: if regulators force studios to keep games playable after shutdown, what does that actually mean for something as complex as Warframe?

Warframe's original design director Scott McGregor, speaking at this year's Tennocon expo, summed up Digital Extremes' philosophy in one line: "Instead of mostly turning it off, we either improve it, or we replace it with something better." That ethos has kept Warframe running for 13 years across a sprawling tangle of quests, areas, plotlines, systems, player-made art, and characters — much of the 2013 launch content still exists in some form today. The studio has cut some things, most notably the underloved PvP raids, but the default move is to polish rather than prune. McGregor also noted that the team has been discussing bringing raids back. Right now, Digital Extremes is reworking Banshee, a sonic-themed Warframe who shipped with the original 2013 roster.

The broader context here is the Stop Killing Games initiative, which has been gathering signatures across Europe with the goal of legally requiring publishers to leave games in a playable state when they shut down live services. For a game like Warframe — always-online, deeply server-dependent, built on over a decade of layered systems — that's a genuinely complicated engineering and design problem. Anthem and SpaceCraft developers were also part of the conversation, pointing to the "massive undertaking" reverse engineering an always-online title would represent if studios were compelled to do it without planning ahead.

McGregor's comments suggest Digital Extremes has at least been thinking about longevity from the inside out — not as a regulatory checkbox, but as a design value. Whether that translates into a concrete preservation plan if Warframe ever does wind down is a different question, and one the industry hasn't answered yet.