Comment by gafferongames
4 hours ago
Multiplayer games typically deploy both client and server at the same time, and refuse to connect a client if it doesn't speak the exact same protocol as the server.
Thus all the versioning overhead of protobufs is not needed for this wire protocol.
(Yes, games still use versioning everywhere else where it makes sense: save games, asset data, config etc...)
Good luck deploying a client to the mobile app stores together with your backend :pain:
But then again, those barely count as games, I guess.
Wouldn’t it make sense to also have the old version of the game live and gradually roll out the new version for mobile
You can do this but if it's too granular (like you have no concept of version compatibility) then it can heavily split your matchmaking.
Plus the headaches of keeping many out of date builds up to date enough to deploy.
Even if you don't care about in game compatibility, all your servers still talk to some centralized data store and that will likely want a single deploy that handles old clients
We do it just fine (not for games). You submit a new binary for review in advance and then do a coordinated release once the review completes.
Then players are locked out of multiplayer until they download a possibily large content patch.