The brand new Sonic racing recreation informed me the opposite day that on-line can be unavailable briefly on account of a maintainence interval. You’ve gone over the sorts of issues that occur throughout this time earlier than I’m positive, however I assumed – no huge trendy Mario Kart video games have ever executed this. What would permit a recreation to by no means go down for maintainence like this? Or is it extra seemingly that every one video games do, however they simply don’t announce it and rely on most gamers not noticing? (Would Sonic being crossplay have an effect on this in any respect?)

We run upkeep with the intention to sustain our {hardware} and apply software program patches and upgrades. If there isn’t any upkeep wanted, it’s as a result of we have no {hardware} and software program doing any work that we have to preserve. For example, for outdated FPS video games that put out their very own devoted server binaries and related through web IP addresses and server browsers as an alternative of through matchmaking, we by no means needed to run upkeep as a result of it wasn’t our {hardware} operating the video games to start with. If there is a software-only technique of dealing with multiplayer (e.g. peer to look) without having our personal {hardware}, there is no want for any upkeep.

That mentioned, it is also value noting that Mario Kart truly does have upkeep. It is Nintendo Error Code 106-0811, when the servers aren’t accessible (often on account of outage or upkeep). There is a NinStatusBot on TwitterX that tracks the standing for on-line play, together with [Mario Kart maintenance periods].

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