The latest Sins of a Solar Empire upgrade breaks saved games from the previous version. I think this sucks.
It was not a really big deal for me, I only lost one game, and I was on the verge of destroying the enemy. It was going to be my first 1 v 1 against a hard computer AI, but whatever, it was not all that hard to defeat.
What bothers me more is that breaking old saves should not be necessary. You can always maintain the code that was used to read the old save file in the new version. If the new type of save file contains information not stored in the old version, then use intelligently selected defaults, or disable what ever that new functionality is.
I work for a software company that has been developing its main product for over 20 years. The file format we use does occasionally change, mostly when new types of data are to be stored. However we have never broken the ability of our software to read old libraries.
Perhaps there is something more going on here, but I’m not sure what it could be.
On a some what related note, one of the Sins developers wrote an interesting counter point to all the noise about piracy killing the PC gaming industry. Read it:
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512