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:

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#

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.