For Warframe, live support means seeing development as a marathon, not a sprint

“If we sprint, it's not going to work.”

- Digital Extremes COO Sheldon Carter discusses Warframe’s live development with Eurogamer.

Digital Extremes chief operating officer Sheldon Carter says that a big part of the reason Warframe has survived for nearly seven years is that its team sees development as a marathon, not a sprint.

Carter discussed the studio and the free-to-play game in a recent interview with Eurogamer, noting that the team wouldn’t last if it treated game development like a sprint.

“Warframe is a game that's been around for seven years and the reason why we've been around for so long is that our development team - generally speaking - take the idea that it's a marathon, not a sprint," explains Carter. "If we sprint, it's not going to work. It's not even a comment on crunch or the industry, it's literally for our business model to work, we have to treat it like a marathon. If we did treat it like a sprint, we'd be dead. If we start losing our key developers because it's too hard to work on this game, we wouldn't.”

His comments are part of a larger interview readable over on Eurogamer, and came in response to a question about crunch. He notes that the Warframe team is lucky to be in a situation where most deadlines are flexible, saying later on in the chat that every game is different and it can be incredibly challenging to figure out pacing and work with difficult deadlines. "So I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for every developer that's in a different position than we are," says Carter. "We're in this great one, so I love it.”