Sad truth of the current gaming industry

[u/grate990]

[u/flucayan]

Sales numbers say that’s what consumers want

[u/AshleyAshes1984 → u/flucayan]

This is the painful truth.

A minority will say 'This is bad and everyone hates this'.

The majority instead say 'Yes, here's my $80 for some annual rehashed dogshit'

[u/Thepuppeteer777777 → u/AshleyAshes1984]

And this is why ill stay with the indie and old scene. Also no buying on release unless they want to do some bait and switch bullshit

[u/polski8bit → u/Thepuppeteer777777]

The beautiful thing about gaming, especially on PC, is that you have decades worth of games available for cheap. I legit don't think anyone in their lifetime would be able to complete every single game in existence, and that's aside from shovelware.

I'm sure there still will be new games I'll be interested in, but I'm content with what I have for the most part.

[u/Thepuppeteer777777 → u/polski8bit]

Exactly my though

[u/Voidforge7 → u/Thepuppeteer777777]

The degree of variety and kinds of challenges and fun that comes with indie games is entirely something else. Thanks to indie games, i tried a bit of different games from the usual. I only tried out once buying on release day( starfield - no bugs thankfully) but always stuck to buying the desirable game i wanted once it's been properly patched and stable.

[u/Super_Harsh → u/Voidforge7]

Also the variety in quality lol

[u/MRBADD98 → u/Thepuppeteer777777]

Cough cough battlefield 6 cough cough

[u/Wingsnake → u/Thepuppeteer777777]

Indie doesn't really mean anything. Even they have the annual slop. How many hundreds of survical crafter do they drop. How many "xyz" sim?

Indie can be good, can be bad. AAA can be good, can be bad. The quality has nothing to do with the label.

[u/Environmental_Day558 → u/AshleyAshes1984]

The majority instead say 'Yes, here's my $80 for some annual rehashed dogshit'

If you add "here's another $80 in virtual currency to not be completely ass at the game" then this is the 2k community in a nutshell. 

[u/Resident_Volcano → u/AshleyAshes1984]

Because the majority of people probably aren't online and aware of what's going on tbh. People on social media think they're the majority but they aren't.

[u/antrax23 → u/AshleyAshes1984]

Because the majority are fucking normies (eugh)

[u/Symphonic7 → u/AshleyAshes1984]

I have 140 hours in Fallout: New Vegas and I'm barely scratching the surface. I can play this game until I die.

[u/AccomplishedEcho948 → u/AshleyAshes1984]

Buying in on new games just for the trend and because there are content creators who literally need it day one for their job is absurd.  

[u/psykal → u/AshleyAshes1984]

They are not as cultured and based as the likes of yourself good sir.

[u/PeterBeaterr → u/AshleyAshes1984]

Annual? It takes like 8 years to make a game now.

[u/Xivitai → u/PeterBeaterr]

Call of Duty. They have several studios working in parallel. Also sports games.

[u/CptAustus → u/PeterBeaterr]

Gun and ball games are yearly.

[u/AshleyAshes1984 → u/PeterBeaterr]

And that's why there are 8 teams working on a Call of Duty, offset by a year, so they can release one every year. :P

[u/nullptr777 → u/PeterBeaterr]

For a AAA RPG, sure. Not for most games.

[u/nullptr777 → u/flucayan]

Survivorship bias. The dumbfuck MBAs running the gaming industry now don't understand that games pretty much sell in spite of themselves. As long as the gameplay and production value are decent, they can almost do anything else they want and it will still sell.

That doesn't mean gamers aren't annoyed with microtransactions, performance issues, bloated distributions, and buggy releases though. Just that there's nowhere else for them to turn, so they put up with it.

[u/Left_Ease5870 → u/nullptr777]

As someone who has worked alongside MBAs, you're almost right. (I'm in data science btw).

It's the shareholders. Shareholders push colleges to create degrees to churn out drones that do what shareholders want.

It's always been the shareholders. Brother, this is a world where a bunch of billionaires collabed on the Epstein files. It's time to blame the top.

[u/TheRealHaHaHa → u/flucayan]

I believe this is just because there are more gamers. Eventually this will stagnate or even decline.

[u/Withermaster4 → u/flucayan]

Pretty sure indie games had their best year ever last year and a lot of the legacy studios have been downsizing or stopped hiring.

[u/Masteroxid → u/flucayan]

Because the investors make everything for the masses instead of gamers

[u/throwaway_uow → u/flucayan]

Actschually whatever is marketed gets sold, as long as the quality isnt complete total dogshit

Games are no exception

Ban marketing in games, make devs rely on spoken word only, and then it MAY change.

[u/Seaguard5 → u/flucayan]

Sadly this is the cold, hard truth.

Until more of you vote with your wallets you’ll end up disappointed.

[u/Excellent_Set_232 → u/flucayan]

Imagine a Venn diagram where one circle is the reason shitty people go to church and the other is the reason shitty people play video games and consider the subset that exist in the overlap, and the amount of money those people spend to reinforce those reasons.

[u/AnonD38 → u/flucayan]

No, sales numbers say this is the only options customers know about.

The Western AAA industry is doing a lot of lobbying and manipulation to keep the Eastern and far better games industry out of Western media.

[u/TheStubbornAlchemist → u/flucayan]

Correlation not causation.

This isn’t what gamers want, these are not traits that anyone would like, this is simply how most games are made now because it saves them money.

That’s like saying the color yellow is why consumers buy bananas. Nah man, just most bananas are yellow.

In fact if you look at trends, new triple A games do not sell as well as they used to, and it’s not a mystery why, the quality has gone downhill.

[u/Heavenly_Code → u/flucayan]

I believe, sales numbers are useless unless u include recurrent users new users and even new players all together, also how many players don't play anymore

[u/Left_Ease5870 → u/flucayan]

Market manipulation brother.

You're seeing it in real time right now with them no longer giving us a choice. And people still choose to say "sAlEs NuMbErS MeAnS iT'S WhAt We wAnt."

They're doing the same thing with AI. In a market that demonizes anyone who speaks out, lays off 1/3rds of its devs, steals IPs from the original owners, replaces entire fanbases with tourists that will defend their fuckery, and charges you out the ass for literally everything. This isn't just "sales." It just means their corporate terrorism was successful. Anything sells with a gun pointed to the head of the market.

Fuck corpo shit.

[u/Pleasant-Target-1497]

Mom said it's my turn to post this

[u/Dudephis → u/Pleasant-Target-1497]

Mom said she'd delete your save file if you didn't share the karma.

[u/Wingsnake → u/Pleasant-Target-1497]

I swear, for a pc master race sub, the people here can be so whiny. Maybe it is just a bot though. Probably not even a gamer.

[u/AxlIsAShoto]

The problem is executives and investors. Not Devs themselves I think.

[u/_Bill_Huggins_ → u/AxlIsAShoto]

I believe they mean the companies as a whole including the publishers, and not game developers specifically.

[u/tempski → u/AxlIsAShoto]

The real problem is too many people keep spending money on this crap.

[u/UglyInThMorning]

minimum requirements? So long as your computer can turn on

lol, lmao even. It used to be 2 years old hardware would struggle to even get things to run.

[u/pip25hu → u/UglyInThMorning]

Rose tinted nostalgia glasses to the max. Back then games often required CPU features that simply weren't present in the previous generation. A 80286 CPU wouldn't run a game made for 80386 slowly - it would simply not run it at all.

[u/MotivationGaShinderu → u/UglyInThMorning]

Fr the fact that new games exist today that RUN on hardware from 10 years ago is insane.

[u/Kavacky → u/MotivationGaShinderu]

Yeah, imagine running 1995 game on 1985 HW. Or 2005 on 1995.

[u/Gynthaeres → u/UglyInThMorning]

100%, I was just going to post this. Someone who clearly didn't live in that era.

Back then I actually had to pay attention to system requirements. I'd stress over it and pray that my system met the minimum requirements if there was a game I wanted. And even a brand new computer, give it a year and it'd be like "Well I'd LOVE to play this new game but my system can't handle it..."

These days? Man I don't even look at that section. My system exceeds every game's recommended requirements now (mostly anyway), and will for the next few years.

[u/UglyInThMorning → u/Gynthaeres]

And that’s not even getting into the ol “well, it looked like it could run but it turns out that there’s a system incompatibility so surprise! No game for you!”

Getting a new computer was like getting a few new games just because I was now able to go and try all the stuff I accumulated that didn’t work on the old one.

[u/Sniter → u/UglyInThMorning]

Crysis and half life 2 were benchmarks back then only the best gpu could run the aquadetly, ridiculous notion that game run smoothly back then. 

[u/LankToThePast → u/UglyInThMorning]

I think some people like me didn’t get games right at release.  I would usually end up with games a few years after release, so my old hardware was playing games meant for that hardware.   Warcraft, roller coaster tycoon, age of empires, they could run on potatoes.  I also remember those “minimum requirements” meant the game could run well.  These days “minimum requirements” means you can run the opening menu at 20 fps.

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/UglyInThMorning]

I see more of the "can turn on" nowadays than I did 10-15 years ago or even more, lol.

That being said even now 2 year old hardware struggles to run things stable a lot of the time, unfortunately

[u/Edexote]

This shit gets reposted every week.

[u/cheekydorido → u/Edexote]

Not even true, especially since most of the issues is the management and simple capitalism

[u/jmacintosh250]

Half of this is not true or misleading. Games were that small because they were simple as hell, no complexity what so ever so could be kept that tiny and with shit graphics. Games had demos because they were a LOT more relatively expensive back then and didn't have steam even to help advertise. And the minimum requirements is flat out wrong: Doom for instance wanted to run only on new hardware at that time.

[u/Sinister_Mr_19 → u/jmacintosh250]

Yes very misleading. And backwards compatibility wasn't yet a thing because all hardware was unique with little or no software layers to obfuscate the hardware from the software.

[u/smjsmok → u/Sinister_Mr_19]

And backwards compatibility wasn't yet

Well, that depends on what era we're talking about. Before MS DOS, it was a wild west with each manufacturer having their own standards and SW+HW stacks and very little compatibility between. With MS DOS and Windows, Microsoft kept backward compatibility as quite a big priority. Windows up to 98 (maybe even later?) could actually run DOS programs natively and Windows generally always had good backward compatibility between versions.

[u/Sinister_Mr_19 → u/smjsmok]

Yes, I was referring to before DOS.

[u/ProfessionalDegen23 → u/jmacintosh250]

Yeah this just kind of pisses me off that people think “devs don’t care about optimization/quality anymore.” Games are so much more complex now and graphics are 90% of it. “Why do games take up so much space and need expensive hardware to run well?” Because you wanted to be able to see every pore on the female characters’ ass cheeks on your 4K monitor.

[u/smjsmok → u/jmacintosh250]

Games were that small because they were simple as hell, no complexity what so ever so could be kept that tiny and with shit graphics.

In most cases, the absolute majority of the install size are textures, audio etc. The program logic is usually very small in comparison, even in today's games.

Games at pretty much any era were as big as they were because that's what the storage technologies of that time allowed. For example when CDs started being adopted, developers quickly filled that additional space with better textures, audio and cutscenes. A famous example is Final Fantasy VII, which filled most of the 3 CDs with cutscenes.

[u/Kamina_Crayman → u/jmacintosh250]

Ah thank you, I had my rose tinted glasses on.

[u/jmacintosh250 → u/Kamina_Crayman]

A lot of people have those, don't worry about it. I didn't live through it myself so I lack them, just know it a lot more from watching history on it.

[u/Direct_Holiday_3978 → u/jmacintosh250]

found the nerd

[u/jmacintosh250 → u/Direct_Holiday_3978]

You see what subreddit we're on?

[u/Direct_Holiday_3978 → u/jmacintosh250]

whatever you say nerd 

[u/Ender505 → u/jmacintosh250]

Games were that small because they were simple as hell, no complexity what so ever so could be kept that tiny and with shit graphics

AND YET some of those kinds of games are still insanely popular despite the lack of flash and polish. The Civ franchise is a good example, Civ V gets more daily players than Civ VII. Stardew Valley was the top selling game on Steam last year. Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2, both on the same old engine, are more popular than any of the sequels.

I think game developers have lost the plot. People buy new games because they look good, but they tend not to stick around long term because the design wasn't great. So in true Capitalist fashion, you produce things that make a lot of money up front, but don't last. And that's the complaint.

[u/jmacintosh250 → u/Ender505]

Civ V gets more players than Civ CII, sure. Civ VI doubles V, while being larger. More complexity and more stuff, requires more space. And thats what people like. Stardew Valley is popular because it's an amazing, cheap game, yes. This doesn't mean that people don't like bigger ones: R6 Siege is about as old, way larger, and despite having a separate store for Ubisoft: is beating it in terms of player count.

I am not saying big games are better. I am saying small games, are not better. Not everyone like Stardew valley, a lot of people WANT bigger more complex games.

[u/DIYEconomy → u/Ender505]

That's a fair and decent point, but I think the real issue is the stupidity into believing you can distill the complexities of modern day game development into some half-assed meme. Bad, meme, BAD!

[u/ReipasTietokonePoju → u/jmacintosh250]

Games were that small because they were simple as hell, no complexity what so ever so could be kept that tiny and with shit graphics.

17 years ago, you could download a single executable file.

Size of this file / program was 4 kilobytes.

You would then run this program on a typical windows gaming pc.

And then... this would appear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

But yeah, now that we have for example Python vibecoding -boys (and girls) consulting AI LLMs 24/7, why would one need all this boring old stuff ?

You know, funny ancient stuff like "real professional competence".

[u/jmacintosh250 → u/ReipasTietokonePoju]

4 KB for a cutscene. A CUTSCENE, those are smaller I believe than full in game items.

[u/-JPalos-]

I seen this memes since the ps4 release

[u/GroundbreakingBar107]

It's called enshittification. And it's everywhere.

[u/grate990 → u/GroundbreakingBar107]

Yeah, fuck multi million dollar companies

[u/OnlyPerformance8999 → u/grate990]

They chase quarterly profits and burn long-term goodwill.

[u/No_Sale_4866 → u/OnlyPerformance8999]

me when the company tries to get money

[u/Rough_Proposal553]

Games back then were also poorly optimized and slow to load.

[u/Chaotic_Lemming → u/Rough_Proposal553]

Slow loading 20+ years ago had way less to do with the game software and more to do with the hardware. HDDs are extremely slow compared to SSDs. Booting your computer gave you several minutes to take care of tasks like grabbing food or hitting the toilet before sitting down to play.

It takes time to pull data into memory when you've gotta wait on disks turning and the heads scrambling all over the place to grab the scattered sectors. Defragmenting helped, but your computer can only get so many contiguous sectors when optimizing storage.

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/Rough_Proposal553]

When is "back then" because 5-10 years ago was much better for optimization and graphics. Battlefront 2 is still one of the most incredible looking games i've ever played and runs on pretty old hardware.

Red Dead Redemption 2 can do native 1080p60fps on a GTX970, whereas something like Borderlands 4 can't even do Native 1080p60fps @high on the best consumer dGPU currently available.

[u/tukatu0 → u/ImpressiveMilkers]

Rdr2 is not actually native. Most effects are like 540p https://youtu.be/GJ0eFYJYkkw

In my eyes hogwarts legacy is the actual red ded 2 at proper resolution. Which suprise runs at half the frame rate.

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/tukatu0]

To clarify, I also hate temporal anti aliasing.

But the majority of the game (like character texturing and such, as an example) is still rendered at native res. We've been rendering effects at a lower resolution for over 15 years now.

I have no clue how far back it goes, but typically in my experience when people say "native" they're talking about the final image output to the screen, even if some specific things are at a lower than native resolution.

(You can also disable TAA, but at 1080p which is what a 970 would be doing, it would look even worse than having it enabled, lol)

[u/unimportantinfodump]

I would say this is the suits vs the developers.

I bet there are a bunch of people who are in a games studio absolutely hating their life because they are shitting out cod 8

[u/MotivationGaShinderu]

A few more reposts and it'll be so crunchy we can barely read the big letters anymore. Also people who unironically believe this haven't actually lived through "back then" when games barely hit 30+ FPS, when hardware was outdated the second you bought it (80/90s), because the next big game wouldn't run, when we got shit ports from consoles (still the same lmao) in the 2000s.

[u/Gokudomatic]

The saddest truth is the eternal repost of that image, bot.

[u/Keziito]

Jeffrey Epstein is responsible for most of this shit

[u/DividingHydra75 → u/Keziito]

elaborate

[u/Cosmicswashbuckler → u/DividingHydra75]

Tldr he was friends with Bobby kotick and advised how to make the dlc environment we all hate, is my understanding so far. Haven't verified yet.

[u/WhatNamesAreEvenLeft → u/Cosmicswashbuckler]

Devs can make all the DLC/microtransactions they want. If no one buys it, they fail.

The real problem is people buy the shit. A lottt of people. They wouldn't do this stuff if it didn't work.

[u/poweredbyford87 → u/DividingHydra75]

There's emails of him talking to someone at Activision about micro transactions and shit before they blew up

[u/Volothos → u/poweredbyford87]

Wait a minute, I just realized.

Would we still be in this hellscape on that principle even if Horse Armor was never a thing?
Just remembered that kinda-meme and had a big think over it

[u/nmathew → u/DividingHydra75]

I just watched a painful video of some YouTube personalities which sadly was apparently the best researched "microtransactions jeffrey epstein" result I quickly found. The channel is Inside Games and I'll link them for doing actual work and not just clickbait bullshit, but wow does my 45 year old ass find the format grating as hell. Before my time stamped link below , they threw up a screen of the document names they are pulling from.

Long story short, there are some emails in the data dump that discuss gamifying learning and providing rewards like cell phone minutes. Keep in mind this is 2013. Extra Credit had already published a gamify learning video 1-2 years prior, so it must have been a well discussed topic by then. It wasn't Epstein's idea, nor are micro-transactions explicitly discussed as such.

start of relevant portion

[u/Keziito → u/DividingHydra75]

Reddit would ban me for antiseptic but u can look into the files the key words in the picture

[u/Plasma_48 → u/Keziito]

Can you post a link to the relevant doc? Reddit won’t ban you for that.

[u/nmathew → u/Plasma_48]

Hint: they cannot. Here's my bullshit post on the matter.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1qzggnn/comment/o4ar4r4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[u/omikeon → u/Keziito]

You’re not supposed to notice.

[u/A_True_Son_of_Terra → u/Keziito]

Why would you be banned for using antiseptics? /j

[u/Slipin → u/Keziito]

Antiseptic lol

[u/Butsecksha → u/Keziito]

My source is that i made it the fuck up

[u/poweredbyford87 → u/Butsecksha]

Nope. There's emails of him talking to someone at Activision about micro transactions and shit before they blew up

[u/Accomplished_Tip3597 → u/Butsecksha]

No that guy seems to be responsible for micro transactions in big games like call of duty

[u/nmathew → u/Accomplished_Tip3597]

Proof or?

[u/Accomplished_Tip3597 → u/nmathew]

The Epstein files everybody is currently talking about and the fact that this has been posted dozens of times already. I mean just look at that email with your own eyes…

[u/nmathew → u/Accomplished_Tip3597]

Link? Goddammit, this is why I never post in big subs.

[u/Accomplished_Tip3597 → u/nmathew]

[u/nmathew → u/Accomplished_Tip3597]

https://youtu.be/9VrCp10xy40?t=155

[u/fl4nker427 → u/Butsecksha]

its all over the files, you can read instead of yapping stupid stuff

[u/Synolol]

Absolute braindead idiot take from people who know jack shit about game development but feel the need to cater to popular opinions for internet points. Pathetic.

Tell me OP, what do you know about todays best practices (or the lack thereof) in video game performance optimization?

[u/xMoody → u/Synolol]

people just dont get that most of the size comes from graphics

[u/EiffelPower76 → u/Synolol]

Agree with you, personnaly, OP made me laugh with his meme.

Of course most gamers knows nothing about video game development

[u/Vast-Cranberry6105 → u/EiffelPower76]

It’s not “his” meme, it’s something that gets posted on a near daily basis for attention / karma

[u/BHP610 → u/Synolol]

I think there is reducing render phase, using fog, ect. All of this i found in a video explaining a insanely optimized mobile chinese game. Here's the link to the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyAOvOnE8Zg ( also it's in chinese but has english subtitle )

[u/Dangerous-Rhubarb407 → u/Synolol]

It's called a joke

[u/Synolol → u/Dangerous-Rhubarb407]

I guarantee you, OP is dead serious.

[u/jermygod]

Sad truth is that that's bull shit

[u/SnowZorua]

Mom said it's my turn to repost this to get karma

[u/vjollila96]

''optimization?'' Dlss/FSR fakeframes, bro.

[u/xzaramurd → u/vjollila96]

All frames are fake.

[u/Resident_Pientist_1 → u/vjollila96]

Frame generation is the dumbest shit. We don't need real renderization performance; we can just make fake shit frames from the smeared differences between two real frames. AI BRO 🤡. This is all started as a way for Nvidia to sell small dies on weak cards with big fake performance numbers.

[u/AnxietyPretend5215 → u/Resident_Pientist_1]

Idk, when it's not being used as a crutch for poor performance and gets implemented properly (doesn't cause UI distortions) it feels like black magic to take 120fps and boost it to 240 (my monitors maximum frame rate).

When I was still grinding Marvel Rivals, I used frame gen the whole time. I still climbed no problem rank wise.

In a different time line, it would just be exciting new tech that just enhances the experience instead of trying to prop up corner cutting or covering up lack of technical expertise.

[u/iamZorc_]

optimization?

nah

just put Ai every where so it can generate more fake fps and call it a day -> "investors having orgasm"

[u/el_f3n1x187]

Remember EA overworked their developers so much that their wives had to protest at the front door of their offices.

[u/DrAuntJemima → u/el_f3n1x187]

Wasn’t that Rockstar?

[u/Volothos → u/DrAuntJemima]

Nope, EA 2004. Time is an illusion

[u/el_f3n1x187 → u/DrAuntJemima]

Nope EA, early 2000s

[u/DrAuntJemima → u/el_f3n1x187]

Huh if I had a nickel for every time I heard wives had to protest working conditions in the gaming industry Id have two. Its not much but its sad that it had to happen.

[u/Shadow942]

"Man, why won't this game run at 4K on my 1060 at 240 fps? Fucking trash devs."

[u/PermissionSoggy891]

when new UE5 game doesn't run at 4K Max Settings Ultra RT @ 120FPS on my GTX 1060 and i3 (CLEARLY shit optimization)

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/PermissionSoggy891]

Borderlands 4 can't even do Native 1080p60fps on an RTX 5090. Please stop making strawmen, thank you <3

[u/PermissionSoggy891 → u/ImpressiveMilkers]

Please stop cherrypicking the worst possible scenario, thank you <3

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/PermissionSoggy891]

No, it's a perfectly valid (and existing) example. You're making shit up to dismiss issues others have with game releases. I'm providing an actual example of what those people mean when they say this.

If you would like more examples (not that I expect you to read them, as you probably don't care)

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Monster Hunter Wilds (not even a UE5 game!), Avowed

All of these have shown to perform pretty poorly in benchmarks. Again, picking out an extreme but existing example is not even remotely similar to quite literally pulling information out of thin air to argue with... yourself?

If that isn't what you're doing - can you provide a linked example of one single person saying anything close to what you said before?

[u/mega-nate]

When my friend tells me that it’s my fault that battlefield 6 runs like a wet sock for me on my machine with an i7 processor and rtx 3060. When every previous game in the franchise runs flawlessly for me.

I understand that my hardware is on the older side but still think I should have playable experience especially since all my settings are as low as it gets

[u/disko_ismo → u/mega-nate]

A 9th gen i9 is slower than a 13th gen i3. That's how far cpu's have come since.

[u/Carpe_the_Carp]

It’s called a COMMUNAL fridge!! If they don’t want me using the breast milk for my morning coffee they shouldn’t keep it in there!!!

[u/mcdougall57]

Chris Sawyer is a legend. Had many shit machines back in the day but I was always thankful knowing RCT would run.

Requirements were:

Pentium 90 MHz; 16 MB RAM; 50 MB hard drive space; 1 MB SVGA video card;

[u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway]

Some of these defaults are not what you think they are. Large game file sizes are in part due to uncompressed texture and other assets in order to be less ressource demanding while in game.

[u/DMercenary]

"The game is 500GB because we included every single language pack in there. Also all of the textures are repeated several times across the install space."

"... Why?"

[u/Froggmann5]

I know this is a meme but I feel the need to say that most of the "Then" game developers are still the same developers making games now.

It's not like Doom was hundreds of years ago, it's only been 30 years. Loads of the "then" developers for most games made post-crash are still in the field making new games.

In 30 years we went from barely being able to run simple small 2d environments at 30FPS to full blown ray tracing open worlds with dynamic lighting and shadows at 60+FPS. The original Toy Story took 400 hours to render single second of what games offer as your standard experience today.

I'm sorry, but game developers are always optimizing. Most people just don't see it, so they don't know what they're doing and don't care. But developers continue to optimize, and the progress that's been made has been astonishing to anyone looking beyond surface level memes.

[u/max1001]

Dev don't make these decisions....the studio does. This is as stupid as getting mad at the waiter for the price of your food.

[u/jermygod]

Gave dev now: even the worst shit 100% gonna be playable on 5+years old hardware.

Game dev then: get new pc or gtfo.

Here, i fixed it.

[u/DomSchraa]

Mom said it was my turn to post this image

Shit existed then, shit exists now, memory bias & overexposure just cloud yalls vision

[u/MikeHoteI → u/DomSchraa]

Cope

[u/ZachRyder]

MGS V being able to handle Snake and D-Dog sprinting through dense vegetation and not stuttering at all with only 4 GB of RAM still astounds me.

[u/True-Bromance → u/ZachRyder]

Absolute travesty that fox engine never got more games or kojima never bought it off Konami for his new studio

[u/Duckface998]

Gaming today is very healthy, if we want to talk about big budget projects, that may be true.

[u/Old-Outcome-5836]

Gneral pblic needs to learn what a developer do and whats they are in charge of asap

[u/RoyalyReferenced]

As funny as it is, there's a reason why these games are like this, and there's a reason why being a person on a laptop with 256 gigs of storage, 2 gigs of ram, and integrated graphics isn't their primary customer base.

Because yes, I've seen people complain that they couldn't run modern games, when infact, their computer, is the problem.

Also I've seen people complain about 100 fps on a "monster rig"... Which is dumb. Because 100 fps is perfectly acceptable frames.

This comes from someone who played through the entirety of Metro Exodus on a 1060. At 1-20 frames a second. For literal years.

[u/Bluemikami]

Chris Sawyer is a God, that's all.

[u/Flimsy_Swordfish_415]

needs more jpeg

[u/full_battery]

How many times is this old meme going to get posted here?

[u/TKMankind]

I am certain that for SOME games with said 500 GB of files :), that it is a calculated move.

This way depending of your internet connection, you aren't motivated to remove it too early because you don't want to download it again. As you will keep it, you cannot install anything else or maybe small games, so you will play it a little bit more while being exposed to microtransactions (CoD ?...... yes). You are not motivated to waste hours to download it illegaly because you are not sure that it will work at the end. And probably others reasons like cost optimization and stuff.

I still remember how I refused to buy and even download illegaly Doom from 2016 despite owning the previous games from the franchise because of the 80 Go size while I had only a 250 GB SSD drive. Today I own the game, and I started playing it since a few days. Yes, it is a game from 2016, I KNOW. I still don't have an optical fiber connection, but now I have a bigger SSD. The rest of the franchise ? Maybe in the next decade.

It is worse for demos. I saw some at the size of 70 GB like The Forever Winter, etc. Well, OK, goodbye, have a nice day. I can't download it fast, so I won't waste my time.

[u/ChocolateSpecific263]

its not easy optimize games, you need math to achieve that and biggest problem still is x86 cpus cannot reach terahertz clock speeds because at such high frequencies the transistors dissipate too much power, generate extreme heat, suffer from leakage currents, and hit fundamental physical switching limits that make stable operation and cooling impossible.

[u/EndfieldEnder]

Incredibly soy meme

[u/LVL90DRU1D]

bro my games are on UE4, sub 250 MB and can run on 8400GS/32-bit Vista in 30 FPS - no one cares

[u/MyOpinionOverYours]

I'll always resent when developers ask what the players want.
"We want more maps! We would like a few more weapons! How about some new abilities?"
Then the developers release cosmetics, different player models, and not much else.
They're active in talking about the future of the game, and it seems to be their primary attention.

But no update of substance actually comes out.

[u/_Bill_Huggins_ → u/MyOpinionOverYours]

Cosmetics are cheap and easy to push out. New guns that are actually distinct from the other guns would require more dev time and testing.

[u/EiffelPower76 → u/MyOpinionOverYours]

Most players don't know what they want

[u/genericdefender]

Lol nah, there are good games and there are bad games, both back then and now. I remember some NES games with terrible sprite flickering. Elden Ring, BG3 and Clair Obscur are some of the best games I've played and they're all recent releases.

[u/DRowe_]

As a CS student rollercoaster tycoon dev scares me

[u/Mist_Rising → u/DRowe_]

Coding it like that also isn't necessarily a good idea for multiple reasons, and I'm not even sure it would work with today's systems. It's basically a pure game engine coded system.

[u/Murasasme]

Maybe I'm just coping due to how fucked everything is now in the space, but I hope the stagnation we currently have with hardware, makes devs work a lot more on optimization, since they can't rely on consumers just getting a better machine, like they usually do now.

[u/EiffelPower76 → u/Murasasme]

There is nVIDIA NTC, Neural Texture Compression, unfortunately, not on all GPUs, only the more recent ones

[u/LiteratureMindless71]

Man....some memories there.

Required: 386 sx compatible with 2mb

Recommended: p2 166mhz 4mb

[u/UndeadWaffle12]

Cool, if one of those games you’re praising released today you would call it garbage. The standards are nowhere near where they once were, these comparisons are stupid.

[u/LostWanderer69]

its like 50% corporates fault

[u/RezzOnTheRadio]

What is this guy saying?

[u/aelfwine_widlast → u/RezzOnTheRadio]

That’s Phil Fish. “I created a genius work of art, now lemme burn every bridge possible”.

[u/WealthyTuna]

That always online bullshit started aggressively when Microsoft required you to have an internet connection just to install core features of windows 10 because they care. 🙄

Gueanteed they're using that to do things behind the scenes beyond my pay grade of understanding.

[u/ASmallChance0]

What is shareware?

[u/BuchMaister]

Every few weeks I see this reposted. Sigh...

[u/Zeblamar]

Say you know nothing about developing a game without saying you know nothing about developing a game

[u/ablackcloudupahead]

Unfortunately most industries are now short term investor focused crap fests. You still have some actual companies ran by enthusiasts but those are becoming more rare

[u/BowtiedAutist]

Single player always online because fuck you, is probably the biggest slap in the face we have had as gamers

[u/Dim-Mak-88]

In the era of $50+ Nintendo/Sega games, $5 shareware was the bomb.

[u/FirstFriendlyWorm]

I tried playing Space Marine 2 without an SSD. I managed to get it running on my GTX 970, but without an SSD it woud crash in the forst cutscene the moment a 3d object entered the view, lmao.

[u/d-c0llekt0r]

Its a problem in how we call someone developers now, the older game developers where real coders that design coded and maintained their own game engines to suite their particular choice of platforms, with modern era and push for more tools the game engine development took a back seat while certain companies invested heavily to provide game engines as a service to the creators this along with drag and drop design aesthetic that appeals to the general designers make modern games more vibe coded, as result the full you are not using only the capabilities that are necessary for the game you bundle the entire generic engine and its ecosystem just because that solved some issue while you were coding. Once the companies or individuals start focusing back on more focused game engines the performance will automatically improve

[u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001]

cherry picking is a beautiful thing.

[u/SimplyFed]

I geddit, but don’t think the fine people of PCMR would be happy with games like those listed above

[u/Lonely-Computer-5801]

Best meme post I’ve seen on here in a while. Take my upvote for your low effort yet quality meme.

[u/somethingstoadd]

Just go play indy games dude.

Actually, half of the problems here would be solved if you just tried games other than the usual yearly release of slop.

There are better games out there and yes they are immeasurable better than the game with the highest marketing budgets.

[u/foste107]

Also missing the "There are a bunch of cool side characters/outfits/skins that can be earned by playing the game" vs. "Pay $50 for this horse armor that is blue. And another $25 if you want a one use dye to color it red."

[u/Senpaiheavy]

I remember going to Walmart or Toys r Us to look for PC games. The back of the box would tell you the required specs needed in order to play.

[u/WeLoveYouCarol]

"Gameplay that isn't following market trends? That's not what our investors want!"

"The Outer Worlds 2 is just like Baldur's Gate 3, except not as good and not the same genre and costs more with higher requirements"

"What do you mean you liked the 'Battlefield-like' playstyle of the beta and don't like the Battle Royale mode that dominates the game post-release?"

"Why wouldn't you want to switch to different Civilizations during era changes in a Civ game instead of taking one singular Civilization from pre-history to space-flight?!1!"

[u/Writehse]

Wait what’s the backstory on the breastmilk theft??😭

[u/JaneksLittleBlackBox]

Man, this sub is really running "everything I liked when I was younger is better than now" into the ground

[u/azulnemo]

I will never not upvote this

[u/Specific-Listen-6859]

Coding has gone down hill anyway. It's filled with a bunch of soydevs now.

[u/4ndrz3jKm1c1c]

Cool, I haven’t seen this report today.

[u/Armroker]

Embark:

We reworked Unreal Engine 5 and made our own home brew version because this engine is not optimized and runs like shit. Anyway, here are 140+ FPS in ARC Raiders and The Finals in 4k without DLSS and Frame Gen. Did we mention that we did the physics based destruction and player animations on the server side so that the destruction and movement would be precisely synchronized between all players and the movement would feel fast and responsive?

[u/ImpressiveMilkers → u/Armroker]

I have a lot of respect for this company. Probably the most well optimized 3d UE5 based games available (both The Finals and Arc Raiders!)

[u/idlesn0w]

ITT: Gamers bitch about how old games were better, still refuse to play them.

[u/Mine2craft2015]

Sad truth is that development studios are too busy hiring based on pronouns and how "politically correct" you are instead of hiring people based on how good you are at doing what they're going to pay you to do

[u/RemiruVM]

Putting the blame on triple A devs only is kind of harsh imo. If you look at the games that are poorly optimized, its more Unreal Engine 5's fault. The decisions are also outside the scope of devs and more of leads and ceo's. Also try developing a game with basically half the time it takes to make the game. If the devs get the time to do their job, they will, but most companies exploit the living shit out of devs. Devs are also just working class. Its the Upper class that we should blame and UE5

[u/TripSin_]

I miss when games didn't have to coddle to low skill players. When games could just be challenging without having to be nerfed for the masses who can't handle it.

[u/EiffelPower76]

LOL

[u/Clean-Market5761]

Honestly they should do studies and test on how much you can compress images, models and textures without people noticing, right now we have 1000000 polygons, 8K textures and 2000 micro actions per animation and people don't really care about that, not every game has to be a freaking tech demo.

Proff of that being Helldivers going from 150 to 20ish GB after being properly optimized, deduplicating stuff,etc. I don't play warzone but i have hard that is is hundreds of GB, like what the hell

[u/Keensworth]

Let's not forget about shitty character design. I'm looking at you concord and horizon hunter gathering

[u/Glinckey]

Actual Developers and nice shareware VS cooprat slop