W4-004 · Condition 01 — Persistent worlds
Persistence guarantee
A persistence guarantee is the commitment that a world’s state — property, history, standing and obligations — continues to exist and be honoured across sessions, ownership changes and the operator’s own discontinuity.
A world that ends when its company does was never a world. It was a product with a map.
Persistence is the difference between a place and a session. Users understand this intuitively and price it accordingly: they will invest years in a world they believe will outlast the studio and nothing in one they believe will not.
The guarantee has degrees. Weakest is a company promise. Stronger is state held in a form a successor could operate. Strongest is state whose custody does not depend on any single operator continuing to care.
Founders routinely underestimate how much of their world’s value is a bet by users on persistence — and how quickly that bet unwinds when the guarantee is tested and found to be a promise.