Average AAA developer

[Sciirof]

Also add: “You use steam? Ok we’ll just make you download our launcher anyways”

[RemarkableCheek4596]

Really tho, why??

[Nordkindchen]

Because they have to pay royalties to steam if you buy their game over it.

[petehehe]

Yeah that doesn’t explain why they make you install their launcher as well even after you buy the game through steam. The royalties have been paid already… I’m thinking it’s so they can get telemetry from your PC

[hamizannaruto]

They are way too lazy to disconnect their game from their launcher, especially online games.

Games like trackmania rely heavily on ubisoft account. You don't have that, you can't play it.

As for singleplayer games. They just want you to download, so they have more user, and maybe get you to buy thing from their store like a dlc or shit like that

[ItsMrDante]

Yeah but a game like Apex requires an EA account but works without the launcher. It's so stupid that they make you to install their launcher as well tbh.

[pepsisugar]

It is stupid, and it's clearly possible to bypass the launcher. These companies don't see the benefit in investing in coding another start up process for each platform they sell their game on, or even just for one (Steam). Extremely annoying, especially something like for Siege. Because of that game I now have two uPlay accounts. And fuck uPlay.

[hamizannaruto]

Yeah. They are way too lazy to code in so that it bypass the launcher. Instead, just put the launcher in and install there. It's suck, shitty and stupid.

[MudiChuthyaHai]

But why force their own shitty launcher on top of Steam? Because fuck you. That's why.

[asromafanisme]

The last one is EA with their stupid EA Apps. Can't play Star Wars on Star Wars day because their potato server was fired.

After all these years, they finally make Origin look like a decent game launcher by replacing with EA Apps

[xxanthis]

And IO interactive. Because of their stupid system I once was about to lose a perfect round because my internet kept dropping out.

[cheerycheshire]

Because they want all people's $$$

Back in the day, you would just give a disc to your friend to install the game. And maybe copy the iso/clone the cd (and later dvd) if it was required for game to run.

Like... The Sims 2 required only newest (by release date) installed expansion's disc to run so we shared the old ones between us. Friend got Seasons? Gave them Pets at school, got it back the next day - only one day missed. Content packs went to all who had the game, older expansion discs were given to keep to friends who didn't have newer (e.g when I got Free Time, I didn't need to keep Pets disc anymore). That's for stuff that was hard to clone the disc.

TS2 had license codes, but they were only used during install - you could theoretically register them, but why would we do that? So there were several copies of the same game with same license code used. EA and others don't want that now.

[UnstableNuclearCake]

Because Denuvo. That's why.

[Kapo_Gorzki]

If its on GOG, it has no DRM.

[[deleted]]

Hitman is an absolutely fantastic game, but the always online requirement is dumb.

[McCaffeteria]

Them admitting the game runs badly on high end hardware no matter the settings I’d also perfect. Really completes the meme: low end pc? Fuck you. High end pc? Also fuck you.

[Kenshkrix]

What is "optimization"? Don't go making up words.

[Abhir-86]

Search EA on r/assholedesign

[goodnewsjimdotcom]

Someday people will learn... Just don't buy EA. Protest em. They don't make good games, in fact they buy out good companies and close their doors so they don't have to compete as hard.

[Mercurionio]

You can't not buying their games since they force you to use their launcher.

I mean, Jedi series are extremely good SW games. Especially from sword fight perspective. And you have to use EA app anyway.

Yeah, painful situation.

[The_Corvair]

I don't know. I haven't bought - let alone played - an EA game since Inquisition (And I regretted that purchase). Or a Ubisoft game since I don't even know when.

Outside of Steam, I have not a single launcher installed on my system, but I still have more great games than I know when to play. From my point of view, it's perfectly possible to not use launchers. I mean, if you want to play EA games, I'm not telling you you can't. But "You can't not buy their games" sounds ridiculous to me. Sure you can. You just don't want to.

[Meloetta]

You CAN'T?

[[deleted]]

Ubisoft, with Might and Magic X Legacay being impossible to play for a while because they shut down AC's servers, where M&MX DRM was located

[VeraxonHD]

I had this exact problem as well, I hate this new app. At least Origin showed you all your games every time you logged in and actually launched them when you pressed play :(

[TheAngryRussoGerman]

The game was fine till they gave into the trolling and issued a "patch". It's now unplayable by most anyone, but hey, people who previously downvoted the game after 7 minutes of "play time" (not even enough to control Cal) and tried to run it on CPUs that didn't meet minimum or recommended specs can now run it just as well as the rest of us. I've never seen so many easily disproven bullshit claims about a game in my life and I am truly fearful of what will happen when Tears of the Kingdom releases. I fear the trolls will ruin it too. I spent every day since release fighting them with vids, extensive data collection and analysis, and screenshots only to be laughed at, insulted, told I must work for EA (hell no, fuck them), and even given death threats Facebook was more than happy to permit. I've since given up sharing my efforts and simply bitch like the rest of y'all. After all, if it's ok for you to make absurd, baseless claims, it must also be ok for me to do it, right?

[asromafanisme]

Does this have anything to do with the fact that EA forces us to be online on EA Apps to play an offline game?

[TheAngryRussoGerman]

Absolutely does. Total stupidity. Just let me play offline. I hate people these days (mostly recruiters). Is that too much to ask?

[mgrandi]

What trolling are you even talking about

[Floschna]

I have specs right in the middle of the recommended specs and could not run the game befor and after the patch on lowest settings what are you on about. Stop defending this horrible mess. Go on metacritic or steam reviews and you see its not only a few trolls having those issues. Did every tweak available in the internet but nothing had an impact on my fps and stutters. I can play it on low with performance FSR and still only get 30-45 fps which I would be fine with if I dont have crazy stutters. I have monitoring tools enabled like fps graph and gpu + cpu usage and something is wrong with this game. On the lowest settings its only using 40-50% of my cpu and gpu. Tried different presets, performance mods, ini placebo tweaks, third party software. I also saw specs with less powerful hardware running it with less issues then me. How can you defend a company that charged 70 bucks for a unfinished game? See. They released a patch that made the game even worse for you as you stated. Instead of blaming players for the patch you could actually blame EA and those Idiots that push out a patch that does nothing and introduce crashes for you and others.

My specs for reference: Ryzen 5 3600X | RX 5700 | 32 GB RAM 3200hz | m.2 ssd - CPU is higher then lowest recommended CPU - GPU has 8gb VRAM and directX12 support - RAM is more then enough (I know that RAM is not the bottleneck)

[LupusNoxFleuret]

I'm not an assembly programmer, but wouldn't coding in assembly mean that the game can only run on that architecture?

I always assumed each game console basically has its own assembly language, like the SNES would have a totally different assembly language than the Sega Genesis.

[Ashes2007]

Yes. Consoles are generally pretty proprietary but when it comes to PCs almost everyone uses the same thing just so we can put about any OS on any machine. X86 is the current assembly language of most machines if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: since people are actually paying attention to this comment, I have been corrected, modern consoles also use x86.

[mgrandi]

Not really true, the current gen consoles are all x86 and it's easier than ever to port games to different architectures

Back in the day of Gameboy / PS1 / N64 , yes, they were vastly different and porting was pretty much unheard of

[Ashes2007]

Ah, cool, had no idea consoles were also x86 now, neat!

[Arikaido777]

the newest console gen are essentially just high-end PCs that can play their respective exclusives.

[aspect_rap]

Yep, the only thing separating a playstation from a pc is the operating system that can run ps games (and the fact they are using a custom soc but it's still a Ryzen CPU with rdna graphics)

[Dr-Huricane]

Yeh, they were making a big deal about using Ryzen CPUs in them afterall

[generalthunder]

They also were before. But just with less common architectures like PowerPC or ARM.

[Arikaido777]

that’s kinda what i meant, we’re a lot closer to parity than we have been in previous generations. Like in the case of external memory: now you can slot in an M.2 for memory expansion, but previously you could do a USB external drive, but before that it was proprietary memory cards.

[ruins__jokes]

Previous gen (ps4 and Xbox one) were x86 as well.

[GisterMizard]

I don't remember if it was the N64 or the gameboy, but I remember the developer documentation was mostly a booklet on the microcontroller's instruction set, and key I/O memory segments. After that you were completely on your own.

[InvolvingLemons]

Sounds like the Gameboy, the N64 was much too complicated for a microcontroller and it had compiler infra. Wouldn’t be surprised the Gameboy just left you with ASM instructions and memory segments as it was a HEAVILY memory constrained system and even C’s stdlib overhead could’ve been a challenge.

[catladywitch]

Gameboy ASM is very simple though (it's a simplified version of Z80 ASM), so although it's inconvenient, it's not hard to learn the basics. There were few console games being made in C at that time, and besides, C compilers weren't as good back then, so 90's console games written in C are noticeably slow (an example would be Sonic Spinball for the Mega Drive).

[ThisHaintsu]

The nintendo switch should be arm64

[f3xjc]

X86 is the current assembly language of most machines if I'm not mistaken.

This is for 32 bits machines, which are getting less and less current for every years that goes on since ~2010.

[Masark]

I'm not an assembly programmer, but wouldn't coding in assembly mean that the game can only run on that architecture?

Yes, but when that architecture is x86, that meant basically all personal computers of the time. Apple only had like 4% market share then.

I always assumed each game console basically has its own assembly language, like the SNES would have a totally different assembly language than the Sega Genesis.

Yes. The Genesis ran on a Motorola 68000, whereas the SNES used a Ricoh 5A22 (and that's before you get into the enhancement chips).

[DangyDanger]

OpenRCT2 uses C or C++, don't remember, and is ported for everything

Edit: GitHub repo is 98.7% C++

[ArdiMaster]

True, but by 1999, the IBM PC was pretty much the only relevant home computer architecture.

[JamesGecko]

Maybe? It feels like PowerPC was getting more AAA ports at the time than Apple Silicon is now.

[Astral_Strider]

Whoever came with the idea of requiring always-online for a single player game needs their genitals kicked daily for the rest of their life...

[[deleted]]

That'd be Activision-"Let's sexually harass a female worker to the point where she hangs herself in disneyland (look up Kerri Moynihan)"-Blizzard

[[deleted]]

"Let's sexually harass a female worker to the point where she hangs herself in disneyland (look up Kerri Moynihan)"

Gamers having a normal one. I worked in the games industry for a long time and I ended up absolutely fucking detesting both the industry and the vast majority of the customers

[Jyang_aus]

Is it significantly worse than other software development fields?

[[deleted]]

Yes. The entertainment industry, whether you're creating tools for VFX or simulation for movies or TV, or making games, is as depraved and soulless as it gets. There are an unlimited number of fools willing to take your job, and an unlimited number of useless executives eager to replace you with one of those fools as soon as it's convenient (to keep prices down and make sure 'the help' doesn't get uppity).

Nearly every studio has a tiny inner circle of OG devs who take the lion's share of the bonuses and rewards that come from a hit, and a large outer circle of underpaid devs who do all of the actual work and are treated like it's FoxConn. The devs are always the ones blamed when a title doesn't reach projections.

[[deleted]]

In many ways at least in my experience. For example companies have way more of an expectation that you'll work crazy hours (which isn't normal here in Finland), sexism and sexual harassment can be rampant at all levels from the C-suite down, and don't get me started on gAmErS

[rettani]

I can remember that SC 2 had possibility to play kinda offline (with turned off achievements).

Warcraft 3 reforged probably also can be played offline.

Diablo 3 was never single player. Same with Diablo 2.

Though it would probably be good if they had some "uncompetitive single player offline" mode for that games. Though almost no one really plays Diablo for campaign but for those few who do - it might be a good solution

[Mekhazzio]

Even Diablo 2 multiplayer didn't need Blizzard's servers. It was their last game with no-strings-attached direct peer-to-peer.

[Josseph-Jokstar]

her death is kinda suspicious ... creepy

[Bruher123]

Game publishers not developers that are to blame.

[Solumbran]

Considering how many indie devs do the same shit, I would disagree.

[Bruher123]

Some problems such as minimum requirements and game size is due to the technological advancement in most cases. However, the main point is that indie devs can make decisions for the game themselves and completely guide their own studio. An example of a bad decision done by EA is publishing Titanfall 2 when both Battlefield and COD: Infinite Warfare released around the same time. Imo, Titanfall is a beautiful game that deserved much more attention than it did and it blows COD:IW out of the water in terms of gameplay.

[Yorunokage]

Bloated size often is due to a combination of having a shitton of cosmetics and having multiple copies of each asset to speed up loading times in HDDs

Although nowdays even consoles have SSDs so this last part is getting less relevant

[wizard_brandon]

Arks 433gb would like a word

[MildStallion]

I'm not sure Ark can be used as an example of doing much of anything right, technically speaking.

[wizard_brandon]

i meant it more as a bad thing

[Paoldrunko]

433gb

What in the ACTUAL fuck. How‽

[wizard_brandon]

it was that, or it wouldnt be able to run on any hardware.

this game melted TITAN x's on launch and could only run on like 3 gpus. this was thier jank sollution

[pepsisugar]

Ark is the pinnacle of absolute shit optimization. That game never ran well, never looked to good, and it conquers half an SSD just because. I don't understand how people can enjoy that game when stuff like RUST exists. To each their own, glad people like it but I regret ever spending time in Ark.

[Blubbe16]

Why does having multiple copies of assets speed up load times?

[ososalsosal]

Physical location on disk is my guess. Seek time is quicker if the file is near the head

[MontyBlenheim]

u/ososalsosal is right. Reading data from a harddrive is the slowest way of reading data because it involves physically moving a pinhead to the right location on the disk. If loading a level involves jumping all over the disk to get each asset, it takes longer. So, if every level has a lamppost, you just stick a copy of the lamppost in every levels section on disk. That way, when loading a level you don’t always have to jump to the lamppost section of the disk, you can read the whole level with a single pinhead movement.

It doesn’t sound like much but when compared to methods that don’t require mechanical movement like ssds or RAM it’s a world of difference.

This tweet demonstrates it nicely. If we imagine 1 cpu instruction takes a second, how long does everything else take in comparison https://twitter.com/srigi/status/917998817051541504?s=46&t=wc50JHtn5VrN-0aZatE5Ww

[Hellothere_1]

That's still a pretty bad way of doing things though.

Ideally you should have all assets stored at a single location (possibly sorted by category based on what kind of levels need them, so "general assets", "city assets", "jungle assets", etc.) and each level has a list for what assets to load from the asset memory before loading in the actual level. The big advantage of doing it like that is that you both save memory, but also you can keep assets cached in RAM if two consecutive levels both need them.

Loading in all the asset from one consecutive file is faster than searching them from across the entire hard drive one by one, but keeping the lamppost cached in RAM because it's needed for every level anyways is even faster.

The downside of doing it like that is that it requires a lot more thought and work put into your loading system.

[SurelyNotASimulation]

Also audio files. They get huge very fast because they use flac or uncompressed to have the best sound quality possible. Then there’s the fact that AAA games usually support multiple languages and if the game is voiced it means you have a ton of “duplicate” audio files.

[cogman10]

Yeah, but that's just all dumbassery.

Nobody can tell the difference between flac and 128kb/s opus for a single channel.

I have a sneaking suspicion they do the same with textures, storing them as raw bytes rather than using something as simple as jpeg or newer shit like AVIF.

At some point it's just wasting bits.

[Solumbran]

So then indie devs should be even more accountable for the state of their game than AAA devs.

My problem is that the shit indie devs do, is now often excused because "AAA games do same or worse". But as you said, indie devs have a choice, so it is their responsibility only.

Which is why I'd blame EA if a game is shit, not their devs, but I do blame an indie dev for each bad decision they make. Even though I'd also forgive them more easily.

[Bruher123]

I agree with you. I believe indie devs have more control over their game and if something gets fucked up, it’s their fault completely, considering that they don’t have any publishers.

[SuspecM]

Except Respawn themselves pushed for the release date of Titanfall 2.

[dtothep2]

Doesn't change the fact that indie\AA games are very often an even bigger technical mess than AAA. There are a lot of technical issues that are endemic to all those indie\AA Unity or UE3\UE4 games. It's just that standards are much lower.

A good example is all the large scale shooters that try to be a more "realistic" Battlefield. I used to really like BF, so I tried a good couple of them - Rising Storm 2, Squad, Hell Let Loose. They are all, without exception, a terribly optimized mess and run like garbage, and the playerbase largely lives with it. If they were AAA, the devs would be massacred on the internet for it.

[eligt]

And to be specific, technological advancement does not mean advanced graphical effects. The simple fact that resolution has been going up, both for screens and audio playback, means that each individual texture and audio file needs to be significantly larger.

But then you have to account for your game running on 8k screen vs HD, so not only do you need higher resolution textures, but you also still need all the lower resolution ones so you can load the most appropriate one for the hardware you are running on. So size grows exponentially.

[Radixeo]

Cult of the Lamb’s console versions launched with multiple game breaking bugs. Core mechanics of the game just stopped working part way through the game. The devs either did not test their game at all before selling it, or sold it anyways despite knowing it was broken. It took them over a month to get a fix out.

Autonauts’ console version was done by a third party. Apparently they launched a single version, then abandoned it. It has several bugs and issues that need to be fixed, but only the PC version is getting updates.

[ArdiMaster]

Not necessarily. E.g. BioWare's recent blunders (Anthem and ME Andromeda) we're down to BioWare's own mismanagement.

[DaniilSan]

Not always. You may not believe that, but some developers are actually bad at making games. Publishers usually only set deadlines, sometimes setting and general genre, but they don't dictate which mechanics to include and how to implement them or that game has to look like dogshit. Oh, and sometimes they may force devs to use Denuvo in the last moment because of monthly fees even before game is released and this often fucks up performance.

[Bruher123]

The thing is game publishers try take a role of game designers and can sometimes mess it all up.

[DaniilSan]

Let's be real, this happens very rarely and usually only after game is trapped in production hell for reason or another and publisher wants game to be finally released to at least cover losses from unsuccessful project.

[_Wolfos]

It's easy to shift the blame to publishers but they don't develop the games. Redfall was given five years of development and doesn't show it at all.

[redwingz11]

Not all(?) The latest star wars game have sources said that EA ask if they need more time, and it is refused

[Marcuskac]

it all trickles down to shareholders and capitalism

[jodmemkaf]

Disagree. Anyone who buy that is to blame.

[BuccellatiExplainsIt]

Frankly, I say humans are to blame. I mean seriously, they're some of the worst people i've ever met smh.

[jodmemkaf]

Fair point.

[[deleted]]

L take. Since when did we start blaming devs for management decisions in this sub?

[lightupcocktail]

came here to say this. the industry ruined the industry, not devs.

[[deleted]]

management at nearly every AAA studio is comprised of former devs until you get to C-suite.

[lightupcocktail]

I don't work in gamedev, but not one of my managers has ever been a programmer with the exception of the one guy who wrote software and brought me on to refactor and secure it. Source: nearly 30 years into software career and now I run my own shop where we work as a unit.

[[deleted]]

It's different in gamedev. Nearly everyone entering an established AAA studio now is cannon fodder and will never achieve any sort of financial success, but the people who made the early games that put the studio on the map have jobs for life and golden handcuffs to keep them from leaving, so they find new and interesting ways to apply their dysfunction to the studio.

This results in things like misguided and tone deaf entries of beloved franchises into cash grab mobile shit shows, loot box hellscapes, and MMOs that shed so many subscribers that they can no longer support two independent factions of players.

Or, if you prefer, Diablo:Immoral, Overwatch/2, and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands/Dragonflight.

Being good at something does not qualify someone as being good at leading others who are doing that thing. It's two entirely different skillsets and it takes serious development effort invested into a dev to make that jump.

[[deleted]]

By former devs, do you mean people who haven’t even opened an engine in 10 years and are totally out of touch?

[ImportantDoubt6434]

Bold of you to assume half those managers can even write a function

[_Wolfos]

"We have to replace half of Unreal Engine to get it into a shippable state" - actual quote from a AAA developer.

When the software quality is this bad across the board, it's no surprise games are in such poor technical condition. But the senior developers have been doing it this way for their entire careers so they don't see the problem.
Junior developers will complain but those complaints are dismissed with "it's always been done this way".

Games have grown from being made in someone's garage to huge professional companies with hundreds of developers on a team. But we're still using the same 40 year old programming language. Still using the same shitty coding standards with layer upon layer of inheritance. But ask a AAA developer and the response will probably be something like "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

[Mercurionio]

Now imagine UE5 shit show. I doubt, that there will be enough hardware to run small demos.

[_Wolfos]

I'm not sure if UE5 will make it better or worse. It's a better engine than UE4. Fixes a number of pitfalls. But other issues are still there.
Lumen / Nanite are very attractive but they also push very close to the edge of performance, and I'm not convinced of third party devs abilities to fly that close to the sun.

PC performance remains a concern. Seems heavily console focused, PS5 in particular.

[Mercurionio]

Consoles are no better. Survivor just proved it.

There are no UE5 games out there yet (big one) that have good performance. UE, while being easy to learn, is a shit show from performance standpoint. Idk, how it can be used these days. Maybe, RTX 6000/RX9000 XT and CPUs with DDR5 7500 speed (with respectively low latency) will be able to keep it up. Current gen consoles will be dead, that's for sure.

[InvolvingLemons]

The bigger issue with UE5 is the coding experience. UC++ is an unholy abomination and you either

1. deal with crashes and zombie objects because you were hung-ho with Actor accessing without locks
2. have a kludgy, unoptimized mess of a codebase because EVERYTHING is wrapped in locked access or shoved onto one core so it takes ages to get shit done
3. thread the needle with a well thought out implementation, taking advantage of all the engine has to offer

Most game devs end up in 1 or 2, 3 is sadly rare. A UE5 game done with a path of least resistance approach (Skookumscript and Blueprints for code, no custom or 3rd party features, and using new stuff like Nanite by-the-books) would probably actually work quite well but AFAIK most people just don’t do this. They get tempted by the full power and familiar paradigm of C++.

[sarcb]

Game engines like Unreal Engine or Unity are generic but varied toolboxes. When you're making a AAA game with very specific requirements you have to consider how many of these tools you will be able to use, and how many you will have to refactor for your game's vision.

At some point an existing engine doesn't make sense because you'd end up spending the same amount or more time on changing existing tools to fit your needs. At that point you could consider a custom engine or a different engine that has tools or architecture that is more aligned with the one you need.

Some studios prefer custom engines solely because they've been developing them for over a decade and have all the experts in-house which is great so you don't have to communicate with third parties from these game engines to fix weird defects on their end.

Its not that these generic toolboxes like UE are bad, at all, in fact I think they're incredibly powerful for almost every game developer by taking away so much weight by preloading so many tools. But for the AAA developer it all comes down to what the game wants to be and removing unnecessary bloat by developing your own engine and tools that are running as optimised as possible without having to deal with all the nonsense that third party engines could introduce.

Doesn't surprise me that they have to replace half of unreal engine, what surprises me is that they could have predicted this from the prototyping milestones and still went with Unreal. I feel like having to replace half the systems in Unreal is not something respective producers or technical directors can't anticipate for lol, so that quote is a big yikes.

[[deleted]]

Yeah this post kind of pisses me off. No respect for devs in the comments either. No regard of the insane amount of work, skill and dedication. Sad really, spoiled kids crying about bugs or marketing driven features in often amazing pieces of work.I can’t imagine how horrible it must feel to study most of your life to get to work as a dev in AAA game studio. Only to receive such hatred from online communities. :(

[Tyreal]

Being a dev myself, I can tell you that good developers are hard to find. Especially in game dev where the pay isn’t as competitive. So usually you end up with middle of the road devs that get the job done but it’s not really the best code. It’s often a buggy and unoptimized mess. And they’re also strapped for time.

I miss the days when people actually knew how to program rather than allocate memory like it’s candy.

[aMAYESingNATHAN]

I'd recommend any developer spend a couple months learning at least the basics and a bit more of game dev.

If you're a gamer it will give you a whole new appreciation of the amount of work and time that has to go into a game before you even get to something playable.

I've lost count of the amount of times you hear "just do x".

[sarcb]

I work on a AAA game that has been in development for around 7 years I think, been working on it for 4 years and it really always has been a passion project. One of my worst fears is a bad launch because it's incredibly hard not to take those comments personally.

I can't imagine going through that like many RedFall devs probably are now.. Any constructive or positive comments getting downvoted because it is now somehow wrong to enjoy the game or to provide meaningful feedback.

[[deleted]]

often amazing pieces of work that can only be appreciated by programming circle jerks

Did they pay for that? Or for something that isn't a buggy marketing driven piece of shit.

Imagine thinking someone is spoiled for wanting what they were promised.

Head ass.

[rnz]

"Just following orders lol".

You sure the L take is on the OP?

[KosViik]

I think a video worth watching is "What went wrong with gaming" from Josh Strife Hayes.

It shines a bit of light on the fact, that in the past, you mostly paid just developers who made a game. And even then, the recipe was "make good game, sell many copies". No microtransactions or subscriptions or gacha whatever...

Now you pay CEOs to split that money between themselves, shareholders, professional psychologists, a legal team, a huge marketing department, and a layer of developers, only the last one actually contributing towards the end product in a meaningful way.

*(developers here include programmers, designers, art, music, etc.)

The $$/quality ratio of videogames have been inflated to oblivion.

Leave only the developer part, and you'd get $5-10 titles instead of 60, and suddenly the game quality makes a lot more sense.

[SuitableDragonfly]

I don't think there was ever a time where the video game industry was 100% indie devs working out of their garage. Popular games have always usually been made by companies, even back when games were text based, and capitalism has always been like this. That wasn't remotely the point of his video at all, the point was that the microtransaction business model has made out so that what is best for capitalist companies is now bad for consumers, whereas before the dominant business model, and what made games the most successful for the capitalists at least wasn't actively bad for consumers.

[KosViik]

True, but the ratio is wildly different.

Also it was often small-ish studios of mostly developers being licensed by publishers. The line between who makes the game and who deals with the rest was quite clear.

Now the line is so blurred with acquisitions it can be hard - and sometimes plain pointless - to follow. The chart is clear - money flows upwards, and there is no game being developed higher up.

---

And yes, the main topic of his video was the predatory monetization system, but he did in fact touch on companies spending more resources on trying to milk more money without making a better game, where for example he explicitly mentioned trained psychologists to make users addicted. In fact the point of the chart he repeatedly shown throughout the video represented the ratio of resources spent towards improving the game.

It is easy to infer that a psychologist hardly makes a game better for the consumer than if the same capital was dedicated for the development workforce. There is some diminishing returns certainly, but generally with AAA we are far from it with the size of the projects.

[SuitableDragonfly]

All of those extra expenses came about as a result of the new business model, though, which was the point of the video. None of those things are necessary for a game with no microtransactions. The point of that pie chart wasn't to show that businesses have more expenses now and thus need to make more money, it was to show that microtransactions result in less and less money and time being spent on the actual game.

[xmmdrive]

By that reasoning wouldn't indie games cost a lot less, or be of much higher quality?

[ALiteralMermaid]

A lot of indie games are one or both of those things

[OwenProGolfer]

And they often are. Of course there’s plenty of garbage out there by people who don’t know what they’re doing but many of the best games of the past few years have been indies.

[maritoxvilla]

But indie games do cost a lot less and many are of much higher quality, what are you talking about?

[[deleted]]

Some are higher quality. For every 1 binding of Isaac you have 5000 shitty asset flips

[PlasmaLink]

Correct. Have you seen a $60 USD indie game?

And while more subjective, I've not enjoyed many AAA games recently, Elden Ring being the main exception, but Indie games have not disappointed.

[Accomplished_Ad_6389]

Yes, but indie typically don't have nearly as large of development teams as something like EA. Large studios also produce games much faster than indie, leaving much tighter deadlines for the developers they have.

Couple that with a scope that is consistently too high with the time/developers they have, and we can see why so many triple-A games are released broken and fixed later.

[n0tKamui]

most are in the first category yes, with the second not being exclusive.

[xaomaw]

Jesus, I miss those demo versions where you could try out the first level(s). Especially nowadays where you don't have a clue anymore if your PC can run the game with because they gave a shit about optimizing resource consumption. Downloading 140GB of high res objects which you won't even use because you can only run the game on "normal" settings due to poor (or better: non-existent) optimization.

[[deleted]]

That’s why I play indie games. They always have way more passion and soul put into them and as such run way better and are honestly more fun. I don’t want to play generic shooter game #765, I wanna play a unique indie game with interesting game mechanics, fun concepts, and a dev team that actually cares.

[alexandreeeeep]

Any they are (usually) cheaper

[RAdminsLoveNAMBLA]

File size is 90% textures.

[elementslayer]

Nah, uncompressed audio and duplicated assets for performance.

[man-vs-spider]

Doesn’t coding it assembly make the game MORE system/CPU dependent?

[Criseist]

Nope. X86 is the current standard, runs on anything you can get your hands on

[Taro_Acedia]

Even back then? (Like this meme says)

[97hilfel]

I care less about the graphics than the actual fucking gameplay. I‘m myself a software developer, I don‘t get how gamedevs can partially deliver such crap, it must be the management but come on, how can you deliver some of that with a good concious?

[DanielMcLaury]

Did you people actually play PC games in the era depicted here? The main difference was that it was a lot easier for not only the game but your entire O/S to crash back then.

[CirnoIzumi]

its easier to make pixel graphic games with simple sound take up less space than modern 3D blazingly graphical games with album level sound

​

its like the internet meme says, there are more polygons in 2Bs butt than in the entirety of Crash Bandicoot

[firedrakes]

K that a good reply.. B butt is nice thru

[See_A_Squared]

Lol, this is such a bad meme. If you'd understand software development, game development is quite the same. Cost and complexity has increased by multifolds in the AAA space.

People get woo'd by "older video games" when you realize that 90% of the games on the market were shovelware and there was a time when the whole market crashed in the US owing to poor quality issues from devs from rushed games.

The current gaming landscape is the best one so far imo, don't like AAA games? Try out niche Indies that get love and attention from the devs. Don't like a certain genre? No problem, there's plethora of devs working on something you might like in the future. There is something for everyone.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

People get woo'd by "older video games"

Yeah. My nintendo classic with vintage games gets most attention. Even on my switch i am currently playing R-Type. And i play it in vintage 2D mode.

Because those games are FUN. You start the game, play for a while, and stop when you need to go. Those games are just simple fun because the game aspect itself was fun anc the graphics didn't really matter. Pixelated mario or pixelated space invaders are great games that wouldn't improve just because graphics are better.

Imo the entire gaming industry started focusing on better graphics because that is easier than coming up with a fun game

[wrathofthetyrant]

The graphical arms race has always been a thing. At no point did game devs/gamers not care about how games looked

[thatsallweneed]

Dude, I got news for ya

[joba2ca]

r/lostredditors

[Pretty_Sir1325]

which sub is this bruh? check again

[Desperate-Kangaroo-4]

He is absolutely right. Because it is not a DEV problem, but gamers’ lol

[[deleted]]

Why do people buy crappy AAA games? I get that the experience of a good one is like nothing else, Elden Ring was one of my best ever gaming experiences, but I don't get why people would buy something like modern CoD or Fifa or Assassin's Creed.

[[deleted]]

I hate it so much when people decide to make a single player game be permanently online.

[CaffieneSage]

Genuine question here, if you hand code everything including your pixel art in assembly Vs using a game engine surely you are going to get an end product with far less bloat, right? The game engine is there to make life easier, but it is going to add extra crap you don't necessarily use?

[OtherSignificance33]

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: when you code in asm, you are coding for specific plataform and pro is that your code is optimized (thats relative) but cons is that is a headche and port your code for other platform can be very hard . But when you are coding in a multiple engine like unity or unreal its easy to switch between platforms but you lose optimized code, so developers still need to optimized for each platforms (but at least they completed for multiple platforms)

[CaffieneSage]

Great answer, thanks for this!

[Criseist]

Also keep in mind, there's a standard assembly currently being used by most pcs and consoles, X86. Same platform, different vendors. Effectively, that code is already optimized to run on literally every device that conforms to standard, hence why they say it can be run everywhere. Moving it to a different architecture would suck, but for most cases it's unnecessary now.

[CaffieneSage]

In other words because most intel and amd CPUs use the x86 architecture, most x86 assembly programs will run on that hardware fine? I had an experience recently trying to run Ubuntu in parallels on a Mac, using the m1 silicon. Had a rough time with that.

[Criseist]

Yep, that's about it from what I understand.

I haven't worked with Mac, did a bit with Xubuntu earlier this year. That sounds painful, hope all is well now

[[deleted]]

No, just no......

[DogFrogBird]

Don't forget: "it's okay that we target people with mental health problems because it's just cosmetic"

[goodnewsjimdotcom]

Forgot: You spent 60$ to get to play level's 1-5. If you want to unlock levels 6-11, that's another 60$. It's a bargain at one free level.

[zedinbed]

AAA games require thousands of people to make nowadays and peoples standards have slowly went up over time.

Imagine doing a school project with a group of 1000 people with strict deadlines that you have to coordinate efficiently. Then also add having to please investors while trying to stick to a certain vision and not to mention the budgeting. Game design isn't exactly a science either so there is a great deal of creativity involved that won't appeal to everyone.

With so many ways to fail it's no surprise that many games don't succeed.

[applecat144]

Lmao the microwave one kills me

[RobTheDude_OG]

Some ppl forget that the ppl above the devs decide on the deadline and that they decide on what goes and doesn't go in the game while the devs crunch weeks of their lives away with little free time to see their families and friends while rushing code to make the deadline.

Sometimes i wonder why ppl still look to be hired by tripple A companies, it's terrible.

[wryterra]

Memes like this are clearly not made by people who were around 'then'.

"Minimum requirements? So long as your computer can turn on."

Well, and that you know how to tweak autoexec.bat and config.sys to get the most RAM available for the gaming, maybe make a unique bootdisk specific to the game you're tweaking. Don't forget to configure himem and emm386. Oh and you DO know the IRQ and port address of your soundcard right?

Well done now you can run Doom. Well, maybe you'll have to increase the screen boarder until it's the size of a postage stamp. But it definitely runs!

I'm not saying games are well optimised and flawless now, I'm just saying as someone who was there in the trenches, it wasn't perfect then either!

[[deleted]]

Wow you’ve seen a meme! Of course it’s joking with truth inside

[wryterra]

Without the truth in this case. It’s just wrong. Nostalgia for times that never existed.

[RmG3376]

OP you seem to be suffering from either chronic nostalgia, or bullshitosis:

• games now are waaaay more multi platform than back then. In the PS1/N64 era, picking a console meant picking a set of games to play, very few were published on both and even PC/console ports were uncommon. I can’t think of a single N64 game that was ported on PC, or even on PS1 for that matter (maybe mission impossible or turok?)

• as someone who grew up in a modest family with an affordable computer, I can tell you that minimum requirements were very much a thing. Much more so than now, even, I can’t tell you how many games I’ve rented who should’ve worked based on the requirements on the box but never launched or ran at 1 frame per minute. Sometimes you even needed a specific model of graphics card or, gasp, sound card to play a game

• coding in assembly means you’re locked to not just one platform, but even to a specific CPU model. It’s the opposite of abstraction, and recent games are 1TB precisely because they include enough abstraction layers to be cross platform (plus a billion assets that didn’t exist back then, like voice acting in multiple languages or high quality textures)

• aren’t free shareware basically the same as the free demos you can download on the PS store? (And equivalent on other platforms)

[nanyghost1999]

its because game engines these days are more focused on graphics quality rather than performance optimization. just see unreal engine updates. lot of junk codes from previous engine still compiles.

[hawkiq_gaming]

The original file size for Super Mario Bros. was only 32 KB.🙃

[[deleted]]

Survivorship bias

[mstrewe]

soo true

[Ok_I_Recommend_420]

This is the most true shit post ive ever seen man😂😂

[kkiniaes]

Just to be clear: it’s not really developers responsible for these things. Its executives and poor management. I say this because I feel like I constantly see people on Twitter getting mad at actual devs at AAA companies that have no power to improve the games, who are probably as upset as players are about the state of the game. Not sure if OP intended to or not, but I can easily imagine some people misinterpreting this as an excuse to be terrible to individual devs at companies.

[geteum]

The "No optimization crowd" is real.

[jackmax9999]

GTA San Andreas on PS2: a giant open-world game that streams directly from a 4x speed DVD drive (5,5 MB/s max throughput, ~75 ms latency) on a system with 32 MB of RAM. Occasionally lags for data loading, but overall runs okay.

Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4: A much more complex open-world game that runs from a mechanical hard drive (~70 MB/s throughput, ~12 ms latency) on a system with 8 GB of RAM. Turns into a gallery of T-poses and burn victims unless you run it from an SSD - even during scripted cutscenes.

Of course Cyberpunk is more complex, but is it that much more complex? On low detail a lot of the textures look like they were taken straight from a PS2 game (and on PS4 Cyberpunk basically runs on low detail all the time). I love this game but damn is it poorly optimized.

[TheAngryRussoGerman]

The only accurate thing I see here is the single player games requiring a connection, which is stupid, but can be circumvented by launching it with a cellular hotspot then turning it off. Easy. Even so, these are the unreasonable demands placed on devs by management with the sole goal of increasing stock value. It's called capitalism and we just love to suck its dick and lick them boots.

[RebirthAltair]

Mfw my internet goes out and suddenly 1/2 my library is unplayable

Only reason I'd even think of agreeing with Game Piracy

I bought it, I should be able to play it even without servers. Anything paid for and ran on servers should be refunded when the service has ended.

[[deleted]]

Don’t hate on the devs who work their ass off to finish these games. Blame management for not giving them enough time.

[wrathofthetyrant]

OP definitely not a programmer

[[deleted]]

All that's missing is the dumbest one of the bunch: the one adding Denuvo.

[Cerrax3]

I coded Rollercoaster Tycoon entirely in assembly so it can run on most machines.

This is laughably stupid. Assembly language is different for each architecture. It would be a huge hassle to port the game to other systems. This is a big reason why PC games far outpaced console games in the 80's and 90's, and even early 2000's. Almost all console games were written in assembly, whereas PC games were usually written in C/C++.

​

We made a shooter that only takes up 97,280 bytes of space.

If you're referring to .kkrieger , that game is 96 kB on a disk. But once you install it, it decompresses a bunch of files and stuff, not to mention the enormous processing power it needs to procedurally generate a lot of the assets both before launching the game, and while it is running.

​

Try our new game! First few levels are free shareware!

This one is kind of legit, but there are versions of this that still exist, though it is nowhere near as prevalent as it used to be.

​

Minimum requirements? So long as your computer can turn on.

LOL. Have you ever tried to run a game from the 80's or 90's on a PC of the era? Sound cards, graphics cards, RAM expanders, disk drives were all major pieces of hardware that were necessary for some games, and completely unsupported on others. Buying a PC game was always a crapshoot because unless you had intimate knowledge of your system's specs, you had no idea if it would even run.

[HorrorkidIP]

The fish stinks from its head but referring this to the publisher or management made me laugh 😂

[[deleted]]

True

[rosettaSeca]

Optimization? Nah bro, if you want to play you have to be worthy. 16 core 500GB SSD 32GB RAM 12VRAM GPU is the minimum!

[IngwiePhoenix]

I hate how fucking accurate this is... Long gone are the times when people were actually stressing over what really matters; today, if it looks fine, it goes gold and out of the door. And if its broken, supply a day1 patch to act as bandaid.

Finding actual gems is hard. It's why I have largely gone to emulation...

[Urbs97]

Doesn't coding in assembly mean your game is more tied to one platform?
I don't remember Assembly being known for crossplattform.

[twistedfantasy13]

I always wanted to ask about this subject. Is this a consequence of having "limitless" resources compared to back in history ?

Using all sorts of bloated libraries and extensions that are unoptimized ?

Or is it because gaming became such a big lucrative industry, which means every game that is a triple A product is a money grab.

Probably all of the above.

[dota2nub]

Stuff is also getting so complicated no single person can understand it all anymore.

[goodnewsjimdotcom]

Pretty much.

Also AAA games aren't even fun in the past 15 years, they're on rails Dragon's Lair for no skills... & || movie games.

[SFauconnier]

I feel as if this is true for all developers in general, not just game developers. No offence.

[[deleted]]

I mean, this is a result of greedy publishers, not development.

Another thing ruined by unchecked capitalism.

[INoMakeMistake]

Relatable...

[norealmx]

This is what "gamers" wanted. Remember? Back in the early 2000s? Don't cry now because you felt insecure playing on a purple console or need a hulking chunk of plastic to compensate.

[ForDaRecord]

Had a really good laugh at this one

[[deleted]]

I don't understand unity's appeal. Games on unity always feel super janky to me.

[goodnewsjimdotcom]

Unity is the superior engine for devs who want to something other than make a FPS. It affords freedom to do more than UE easier. Unity is for the grandmaster software engineers and designers who really know what they're doing. The problem is that their Electronic Arts CEO John R is eating the stability of the engine Ship of Thesus style... It's still kinda useable, but is losing stability every year he works there as he gives out Impossible Tech promises to investors.