# V5 Sunset & End-of-Life Commitment plan-id: `v5-sunset-eol.v1` Status: Draft for review — fills audit gap V1_V7_PLAN_SET_AUDIT_2026-06-12 §6.2. A product whose core promise is anti-"coming soon" — "all 5 cells ship complete, no skeleton mode" (features§"Launch Readiness") — owes players the symmetric promise at the other end of the lifecycle: no rug-pull. This document is the player-facing commitment's internal spec; a plain-language version publishes on the marketing site's roadmap page (the public roadmap is already specced, features§"Community"). Owners: Live-Ops Producer (commitment + calendar), Commerce Counsel (consumer- law conformity, escrow contracts), V5 Online Services Lead (Preservation Patch scope), Economy/Marketplace owners (wind-down mechanics). Grounding: features§"V5 Product Promise" and §"Online Services" (online services are non-blocking for single-player; offline-deterministic campaign play with local saves is the architected degradation path — EOL is, by design, the permanent form of that degradation), ADR 0007 (no third-party DRM — there is no DRM server whose death can brick the game), ADR 0016 (cross-progression), ADR 0020 (no public server binaries at launch → the studio carries the dedicated-MP preservation obligation), launch 2027-03-01. --- ## 1. Minimum Live-Service Commitment - **Minimum online-service operation window: 5 years from launch** — through **2032-02-29**. Within this window the online backbone (the 16 services), dedicated-server MP, the hub, workshop, and marketplace operate at their SLOs regardless of commercial performance. Planning assumption adopted 2026-06-12; the floor is a published promise, not a forecast — the intent is to run far longer if the game earns it. - Seasonal **content** cadence is explicitly _not_ part of this commitment (content scales with audience); the commitment is that **what shipped keeps working**. - Mode-level consolidation inside the window (e.g., merging two dying ranked queues) is allowed with 90-day notice (§3) but removal of a whole specced surface (workshop, hub, a cell's MP) is treated as partial sunset and takes the full §3 notice machinery. ## 2. Per-Cell Offline Preservation Commitments The degradation spec already guarantees single-player works with services down; EOL makes that permanent. Commitments per cell: | Cell | Preserved offline forever | Lost at shutdown (honestly stated) | | ------------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------- | | Urban | Full campaign, open world, persistent world economy (deterministic from world seed — it never needed a server), heists vs AI, local saves | Urban Freeroam MP, leaderboards | | Frontier | Full campaign, open world, bounty/train/weather simulation (seed-deterministic), local saves | Frontier Posse MP | | Hunter | Full campaign, contract boards (local generation), alchemy/bestiary progression | Co-op contract MP | | Sci-Fi | Full campaign, commodity/mining/faction simulation (seed-deterministic), local saves | PvP modes, Capital Raid | | Period | Full campaign and casework | Online-shared casework surfaces | | Mind Palace / cross-cell | Cross-cell deduction graph and cross-era arc fully playable offline (a launch gate already requires the arc playable end-to-end; EOL requires it _without_ mindpalace-cloud-sync — local-only sync path) | Cross-device sync | | Bureau HQ hub | Offline hub variant: solo-explorable space with trophies/codex/settlement history snapshotted | 64-player presence, live-event boards | These rows become test cases: the **EOL conformance suite** is the existing offline-degradation test set plus the hub-offline and local-sync variants, run green as part of every Preservation Patch candidate (§4) — and run annually from launch so the capability never rots while the service is alive. ## 3. Notice Periods and Wind-Down Sequence | Event | Minimum public notice | | --------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------ | | Full online shutdown | **12 months** | | Partial sunset (a whole online surface) | 6 months | | Mode-level consolidation | 90 days | | Marketplace **stop-sell** (precedes shutdown) | 12 months before shutdown date | Wind-down sequence for full shutdown (T = shutdown date): - **T−12 mo** — public announcement with the exact date; marketplace stop-sell (no new paid listings or purchases; existing entitlements unaffected); stop-sell of any remaining paid online-only content; storefront pages updated per disclosure rules below. - **T−9 mo** — Preservation Patch (§4) enters cert; final-season content plan published (the last season runs to its scheduled end, not cut short — Season-window integrity matches the season manifest pattern). - **T−6 mo** — Preservation Patch ships to all 9 platforms; from here every player who launches the game once is EOL-ready. Creator payout finalization begins: final sales close, the 90-day rolling chargeback reserves (`ugc-marketplace-compliance.md` §6) run off on schedule, final payouts including all reserve releases complete by **T−1 mo** — no creator money is stranded behind the shutdown. - **T−3 mo** — workshop catalog export (§5) published; balance ledger archived to a static public mirror; DSAR/compliance data handling continues per retention schedules (compliance-dsar obligations outlive the game servers — Commerce Counsel owns the post-shutdown data entity). - **T** — online services stop. Single-player, LAN, listen co-op, offline hub all keep working via the Preservation Patch. - Consumer-law conformity: refund posture for recent purchasers at stop-sell follows storefront and statutory rules per market (EU Digital Content Directive conformity, California AB 2426-style digital-"purchase" disclosure language on store pages from launch — store copy must never promise perpetual online service). Owner: Commerce Counsel. ## 4. The Preservation Patch (contents are commitments) 1. **Entitlement and sign-in**: remove every online sign-in requirement; LAN's "initial entitlement check" (features§"Network Quality, LAN, and Server Browser") is patched to platform-local entitlement only. ADR 0007 (no third-party DRM) is what makes this a config change rather than an architecture change — preserve that property in every interim patch. 2. **Connectivity**: LAN and listen-server modes for every bounded co-op mode; dedicated-only modes get a listen variant where the mode's player count allows (≤16), and the 64-player hub gets the offline solo variant (§2). Per ADR 0020 there are no public server binaries during live operation; at sunset the **community-server release decision** is formally taken — the default position is to release dedicated-server binaries at EOL (anti-cheat and most licensing constraints lapse with the service), subject only to the middleware-redistribution audit; if that audit fails, the listen/LAN path above is the floor that already keeps every preserved mode playable. 3. **Saves and progression**: cloud saves force-exported to local on every platform that allows it; cross-progression (ADR 0016) ends, local profiles continue; final online profile snapshot baked into the local profile (cosmetics, Bureau XP, codex, settlement history — the hub's account-scoped domains). 4. **Workshop**: subscribed items re-validated as local content with the pinned-version linter behavior preserved offline; the in-game browser switches to installed-content management. 5. **Telemetry/anti-cheat**: telemetry endpoints removed (not just dead — removed; no boot-time timeout cost), EAC made fully optional/inert (it already governs online play only). ## 5. Escrow and Open-Sourcing - **Escrowed from launch, quarterly deposits** with a third-party software escrow agent (release conditions: studio insolvency, or failure to deliver the Preservation Patch obligations by T): the 16 services' source + deployment manifests, the dedicated-server binary + build instructions, the save-format and economy-seed documentation. Owner: Commerce Counsel; contract target before launch (2027-02). - **Published at sunset (open standard, not GPL-encumbered middleware):** - the service **API contracts** (the per-service `contract.json` set under `apps/v5/`) — enables community shims/emulators after shutdown without the studio distributing licensed middleware; - the **save-format specification** and world-seed economy determinism notes (enables save editors and preservation tooling); - the **workshop catalog export**: full metadata for every published item plus the items themselves for creators who opt in (creator IP — opt-in is mandatory, default prompt sent at T−6 mo; paid-item export is metadata plus purchaser-side local copies, never a free release of paid content without the creator's consent); - the archived **public balance ledger** (already public; the archive makes it permanent). - Not committed: engine/game source (licensing makes this non-promisable — do not imply it in public messaging). ## 6. Governance - This commitment publishes (plain-language version) at launch and is reviewed annually at the live-ops yearly planning review; the commitment can be **extended or strengthened, never weakened** for already-sold copies — weakening only ever applies to copies sold after a revised publication. - The EOL conformance suite (§2) runs annually; a red run is a SEV-3 with a named owner — preservation capability is treated as a live product surface, not a someday patch. - V7 interaction: if V7's community-realm platform (per ADR 0020's supersession note) absorbs V5-era multiplayer hosting before any sunset, the §4.2 community-server decision is satisfied by the V7 path, and this document is amended with the mapping.