[Markus Heinsohn]

Dear Perfect Team users,

As many of you already know, we had to switch the backend provider of Perfect Team for the OOTP 23 launch. Today I want to share some background information and what this means for the functionality of the old Perfect Team versions prior to PT23.

Since its inception, Perfect Team was built using GameSparks as the backend service provider, which means they host the databases and offer functionality that every online game needs, like login authentication and payment services. In 2018, GameSparks was acquired by Amazon, so the future of the service looked very bright, as future versions were promised for even better performance and user convenience. But right at the start of the OOTP 23 development cycle, we were shocked by the news that Amazon decided to shut down GameSparks because apparently it was not profitable enough. So we were forced to look for a different backend provider and eventually settled with Heroic Cloud (Nakama), which is now running PT23. The switch to Nakama was very challenging and still is. Further, it was technically impossible for us to move prior versions to the new service, as we had to develop a lot of the new code from scratch and the databases used are vastly different. We have frequently asked Amazon for an extension of the GameSparks service time, so that we could have PT22 run until April 2023 to match the 24 month lifetime of each version we are planning for, but we were denied repeatedly. Services were to be terminated in September 2022. The last news we received recently was that an extension would only be granted in "special cases" for a monthly fee which was exorbitantly high and far out of reach for a small company like ours.

This means, on September 30 2022 GameSparks will shut down and all Perfect Team versions prior to PT23 will no longer function. The last PT22 season will end September 25, simulation servers will shut down Monday September 26, and on Wednesday September 28 we will disable the access to PT22 (and earlier versions) completely. We wish we would have been able to have PT22 run until April 2023 as we had originally planned, but this is no longer possible. We are very sorry for this, and we wish there would have been a way to prevent this, but sadly that is not the case.

So while the service will shut down, we are working on a way for users of previous PT versions to view their legacy collection of cards and also some statistics (tournaments, season records etc.) on a website and also within Perfect Team 23. There is no ETA yet for that functionality, but we hope to have it available prior to September 30.

Thank you very much for your continued support in these challenging times.

Markus and the entire OOTP Team