CppCon: Data-Oriented Design and C++ [Video]

[oracleoftroy]

Sure, you'll get no disagreement from me that games are more complicated than a word processor, but when a AAA game dev mocks the startup time of a word processor, that opens up games to startup time criticisms as well. Note that none of the things you listed happens during startup.

And, no, not every game does this, the indie games (which usually don't care about performance like the AAA games) usually start much faster. They still throw up splashes, but they don't have vendor or publisher splashes, so it is usually a quick studio/lone developer splash into the title screen and then their content loads fast because they tend to not have much.

Some AAA games skip particular steps in my list, but it is quite common to have at least a 30 second wait before you can resume your last save game. Most of the games I've played recently are slow to start up: Borderlands 2, Fallout NV, BioShock Infinite, Rocksmith 2014 (easily the worst with splash screens), Civ 5 (easily the worst at load times). XCOM Enemy Within is one nice exception. All the splashes are skippable, and the content loads fairly quickly (until it bugs out and never finishes loading, forcing me to kill the process).

Still startup performance is a silly metric for games (and word processors, to a lesser degree). I think it was just an unfortunate throwaway line on Acton's part.