If you haven’t been paying any attention to in-development solarpunk MMORPG Loftia, you may want to revise that decision. This week, the Kickstarted game issued a statement about game preservation that ought to make other game studios hang their heads for not doing it first.

“The ‘Stop Killing Games”’ movement is something that is really important to us here at the Loftia team,” indie studio Qloud writes. “As players ourselves, we’ve felt the sting of a beloved online world and place to share with friends vanishing forever.” That’s not just patter, by the way; the devs then list out some of their bona fides, an executive producer who came from the Asheron’s Call team. All of this is to say that Loftia’s team is already thinking about preservation even before launch, though not everything is eligible for open-sourcing, like Qloud’s custom additions to UE5.

“First, we make sure that the game won’t completely break if a ‘leaf’ part of the backend services goes down,” the devs explain. “A ‘leaf service’ would be any service that isn’t absolutely essential to the game functioning – things like achievements and chat, amongst others.” Second, the team vows to release a “Loftia Ark” that basically includes “the pieces [players] could use to host their own version of the game,” like the full client, dedicated server software, backend blueprints, open authentication, and documentation.

“A plan like this requires extra work. It means ensuring we have a ‘post-shutdown’ life in mind for systems, careful documentation, and maybe even having to spend the last weeks of our studio working on preservation. But for us, the cost is more than worth it. We are building Loftia to be a place of comfort, creativity and connection, and the idea that all of that could be erased breaks our hearts!”

Well that was wholesome – and a far cry from megacorps insisting that planning for sunset is just too expensive, as if we can’t hear them talking about their very obvious plan to obsolete games and ensure we don’t own them. If a Kickstarted MMORPG can do this, so can y’all.