I'm finishing my university studies specializing on software development, and have two years of experience in the field. It's pretty clear from your comment, that you don't understand the situation, or even my comment.

The data wipes were clearly a business decision, so I'm pretty sure you're thinking about the loss of licenses on customer accounts. First off, it's not a matter of writing code, so even that isn't about programming. If you think the loss of customer data is about writing code, then clearly writing code is hardware engineering. Database management and hosting has absolutely no innate programming requirements.

When it comes to actual programming, one of the greatest challenges of making a functional program, is getting and understanding the requirements for it. It's in no way unthinkable, that the publisher would be the go between for devs and sale's platform, and this is something that has a huge impact on whether the interfacing of clients, accounts, and game servers will work.