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Is your job like being in a dark room with a bunch of spinning plates, just pulling levers like Willy Wonka to try to keep everything going? Am I close to that?

TL;DRAhmed Shaker says the comparison is pretty close: the team takes custody of the game, treats it as an ever-evolving living thing, and enjoys the challenge of players constantly trying to break it.

Ahmed ShakerSenior Director of Publishing Technology

I mean, it is pretty close. The fact is we do not just own the infrastructure that the game runs on. We take custody of the game from the moment it comes to us. So we pride ourselves on being experts in how the game runs. Sometimes the developers who work in the code themselves come sit with us and get amazed by how we get to know where the issue might be before we even get to look at logs or look at graphs or look at any kind of data to figure out what's going on. The game is a living creature. It's in its own high fidelity, and the dedication that we see from the community. We also get to see that our community does not deal with it as a rigid system. They try to always interact with it in a very, very unique way. We saw a lot of that, especially after Persistent Entity Streaming was released. And we like the challenge. We like what they bring to us. They try to break our systems. They try to break the game. So there's always a lot of fun going on. And again, it's not like you're hosting any kind of very established static piece of software, making sure it has connectivity and IO and compute. No, this is an ongoing thing that's always evolving. And a lot of the time we learn about the software we're running as it ages. So as a lot of the backers remember, we have publishes that could live for a few days. We have publishes that could live for 90 days. And every single day there is a new thing to learn. So yeah, there's a lot of holes to fill and a lot of plates to spin.