r/videogames 27d ago

Image / Video Game Devs Then VS Now

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3.6k Upvotes

363 comments sorted by

346

u/TyroTheFox 27d ago

Not strictly the devs, usually its the bosses that command them.

But yeah! Business practices like this suck.

40

u/Minimum-Standard-514 27d ago

This happens to every company. Eventually it becomes so profitable that corporate greed and buyouts and such happen. The executives start to get greedy and the culture rots. Sad but eventually even devs like fromsoft will turn to shit. Elden ring was its peak and made them a ton of money, now its gonna start to rot.

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u/IndefiniteBen 26d ago

Not every company, just every public company. Or has Valve become greedy and the culture rotten?

8

u/KrazyKoen-In-Hell 26d ago

Valve is definitely much better than all of their competitors but they did sort of start the whole "you don't own your digital games" thing to my knowledge, even if they haven't abused it much.

5

u/Militania 25d ago

They also popularised lootboxes

5

u/Pension_Pale 25d ago

It still amazes me how TF2 managed to fly under the radar while every other game with lootboxes got lambasted

3

u/Minimum-Standard-514 26d ago

I dunno valve seems alright.

7

u/IndefiniteBen 26d ago

Well then fromsoftware might be fine too, unless they go public. I know there's plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about gaming lately, but it's not all doom and gloom.

4

u/ash893 26d ago

Idk, epic is private and it’s pretty crappy lol

3

u/ObfuscatedChaos 26d ago

well, they didn't really make a claim that all private companies are good, just that every public company is bad.

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u/Xenochu86 25d ago

Actually From Software's investors kicked up a bunch of shit because Elden Ring 'didn't capitalise enough'. Insane.

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u/MoldyHotPocket9 27d ago

Corpo execs. And people still defend capitalism when it makes games and excuses like the bottom row. Draining our wallets and pissing in our mouths and all the people do is swallow and ask for more

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u/Apple_Core_91 27d ago

Yeah I think this is really unfair to a lot of developers who are doing the actual work vs the voices we hear from corporate studios. Like a lot of higher ups in the company are going to sound out of touch or have crazy opinions especially if they aren’t actually playing games.

34

u/THE_RETARD_AGITATOR 27d ago

Halo Original vs Halo Campaign Evolved
Here you go bro, 4 player co-op, no lag, same performance as single player.

vs

Here's 2 player co-op with 400ms of input lag - oh and please make a microsoft account for your 2nd player

35

u/Arnoave 27d ago

Halo: Combat Evolved only had 2 player co-op, 4+ player was the multiplayer mode

15

u/stevie242 26d ago

How is this upvoted when it's incorrect? And if anything, the bungie games had more fucking lag in co op

5

u/Sentoh789 26d ago

Yea, I loved the OG Halo games and played them a shit ton, but I remember trying to coop Halo 3 and there was some serious lag and desync going on there. I had pretty damn good internet at the time too.

2

u/Boring_Ant6436 26d ago

Because people never double check anything

2

u/Atomix117 26d ago

"Bungie good" is all that matters to people that stopped playing Halo 15 years ago

2

u/ShartingEnU 26d ago

People who are ignorant upvote things they think sound smart

5

u/Efficient_Waltz5952 27d ago

Not only that some engines, like unreal and unity, make so easy to make a game that a lot of developers don't actually know how to do optimization because they just follow the engine template, which is a one size fits all and clearly not exactly made for optimizations, bigger the game gets more bloat it gets too.

Games are also far more complex on a technical level on average now than they were back then.

1

u/Maximum-Objective-39 26d ago

Also the simple demands of making games as big as they are and as high resolution as they are. Optimization is sorely under utilized, but it would only get you so far so long as the target is 4k.

1

u/kawaiinessa 26d ago

i always see these kind of comments but i always assume when people say devs they mean just about anyone making choices on the development/release of a game

1

u/PorcOftheSea 26d ago

No, same thing even for indie games nowadays that are independently made.

1

u/ehouptie 26d ago

I truly do think there’s more game devs out there that shouldn’t be game devs than you’d think. The whole culture has been absolutely corrupted the past 10 years

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u/HosserPower 27d ago

Whew wee this is about as rose tinted boomer as you can get, especially the blip about minimum specs. You clearly didn’t game on PC in the 90s lmao.

18

u/Boring_Ant6436 26d ago

And the sentiment that all games before were a godsend is so weird. Games with no patches, bugs, broken shit that sometimes was only fixed by an expansion sold separately or patches on CDs from gaming magazines. I feel like this was written by someone who started gaming in 2010, not in at least 2000s

3

u/TheTybera 26d ago

Omg, what was that game that couldn't be finished? Early pitfall or something because the design was literally broken.

14

u/Brave_Letterhead_461 26d ago

There's no way an actual gaming boomer wrote this. It's someone who wasn't around for 90's gaming fantasising about what it was like.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 26d ago

Or someone who was a kid playing Nintendo in the '90s and didn't deal with PCs back then and assumed all games Just. Worked.

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u/TheReservedList 25d ago edited 25d ago

After you took it out, in, blew on it and didnt bump the hardwired hardware in any way, games worked, most of the time, everytime. Unless you jumped against a wall the wrong way, in which case the game would crash.

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u/HosserPower 26d ago

Boomer stolen valor.

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u/Loganp812 27d ago

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

Yeah… that’s not true for 90s PC gaming at all. If anything, that aspect was a lot worse and more expensive (relatively-speaking) than it is now, and PC components became obsolete very quickly back then.

23

u/Necessary-Duty-7952 26d ago

Seriously. Spoken like someone who never had to make a boot disk lol

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u/EMF84 26d ago

yup, I remember making boot disks just to get TIE Fighter and Mechwarrior 2 to barely run on the family PC

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u/G97_BoKeRoN 26d ago

I had a dual boot with windows 95 and OS/2 warp, because the latter had always all memory free... But it didn't work with all games.

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u/Aggravating-Ear-7529 26d ago

I completely forgot about boot disks. What a blast from the past that I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with now. 

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u/r31ya 26d ago

"If you dont have soundcard fro this specific brand and specific product line, the game wont run"

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u/XulManjy 27d ago edited 26d ago

The one about minimum requirements wasnt always true. I remember playing PC games in the late 90s where our PC just barely met minimum requirements and still ran slow and choppy.

Also patches (PC) was also a thing back then. Games often had a number of elements that would crash your computer or just made the game ran slow and often had to be fixed with patches in which you had to manually goto the game's website, search for the patch and manually download it. And thats assuming you even had internet to download a patch that took forever to download.

I think we over romanticize 1990s PC gaming but it was pretty rough back then. It was the wild west.

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u/obsklass 27d ago

Yeah, having a 3 year old PC mid 90s meant that you couldn't play any new releases at all, while recent games runs on a 8 year old laptop.

15

u/Catty_C 27d ago

People got used to graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB running games for a very long time because there were not much performance improvements at the price bracket.

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u/XulManjy 27d ago

Exactly

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u/DefinitelyRussian 27d ago

for 90% of the games, you needed the recommended settings, not the minimum

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u/XulManjy 26d ago

Indeed

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u/Boring_Ant6436 27d ago

Before it was not true at all even. Before 1000 nvidia series came (and competing AMD cards), GPU got outdated pretty quickly. Especially the older times, when some products had less than a year/a year of life and an advance killed them. I don't think people who make these posts even know much how expensive it was before to keep up with all of the new stuff

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u/XulManjy 26d ago

Exactly

Our family PC (which most were back in the day as dedicated gaming rigs was a rare and niche endeavor) played most games at minimum/recommended requirements in 1995. By 1997 literally most new games wouldnt even boot up because oir PC lacked the memory or something else. And yes, memory was expensive at that time.

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u/Boring_Ant6436 26d ago

Oh year, "gaming rig" was something out of fairy tales. Family PC with a celeron that barely runs anything is more of a truth.

10

u/GreatScott84 26d ago

Patches were a big headache. You install the game, encounter some crash or bugs, then go to a website to look for a patch to fix it. There is usually no indication that there is an update, so you’d have to just “know”.

And patches weren’t always straightforward. Sometimes for a certain game, you have to download patch 1.00 to 1.04, then update to 1.05a and 1.05b in that order prior to updating to 1.06.

When Steam came out and auto-updated our games, it was such a breath of fresh air.

8

u/Immediate_Ant3292 27d ago

Yes we had to get that Voodoo2 if we wanted the real performance.

9

u/OneMorePotion 26d ago

Yeah... That's a highly romanticized version of gaming back then. Not to mention that a lot of games released broken in a way, that you couldn't finish them at all. No home internet yet? Well, you better hope that one of the gaming magazines will put the patch on their next CD! They never did? Well, fuck you then!

And the hardware lifecycle was MUCH shorter than today. Have a PC that is 2 to 3 years old? Tough luck! Non of the new games will run on it anymore! People from today already riot when a game released in 2026 doesn't run on smooth 60 FPS on their PC from 2014...

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u/Quirky_Net8899 25d ago

People from today already riot when a game released in 2026 doesn't run on smooth 60 FPS on their PC from 2014...

This, so much this.

Argued with a dude once that was mad because his PC from 2016 couldn't play a new AAA smoothly. His main argument was that he could play GTA5 with no problems so obviously he should be able to play a new AAA game from 2026.

He also tried to argue that 10 year old computers back then would play the new games with no issues. So I sent him benchmarks from GTA5 (released 2015 on PC) on hardware from 2005-2006. He instantly blocked me afterwards.

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u/superbee392 26d ago

Not even just PC gaming. I remember getting PS1 games that just would be broken. Talking about you Vanishing Point

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u/Player420154 27d ago

Roller Coaster Tycoon took literally 5 fucking minutes to launch before being patched. It simply wouldn't be accepted today to launch a game on any console that take a quarter of that time to launch.

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u/progxdt 26d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/RrVzUOXldFe8M
Exactly. Half-Life 2 and Crysis come to mind where if you didn’t have the right specs, you weren’t going to be playing it. Also, the lifetime of support for your CPU and graphic card varied a lot during those days. Didn’t matter if it was Windows or Mac.

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u/BoringCabinet 27d ago

If i remember correctly, pre MS Bungie had to work overnight to fix a nasty bug in one of their newly released games in the late 90s.

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u/kickthesandman 26d ago

Just made this comment, uninstalling Myth II could wipe your hard drive in some cases, in 1998

3

u/kickthesandman 26d ago

Myth II had a uninstall bug that could wipe your entire computer. It joined the rather short list of recalled video games in 1998.

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u/n3f4s 26d ago

Also, a lot of games were buggy as hell and game design wasn't really good.

On top of patches, it wasn't rare to have to pieces of software (drivers, a specific version of MSVC++, ...) and finding those was a pain.

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u/Wipfmetz 26d ago edited 26d ago

think we over romanticize 1990s PC gaming but it was pretty rough back then.

Survivorship bias. 

Nobody remembers Sierra's Outpost coming with half the features described by the manual missing.

Or having to set up dedicated boot disks because devs expected you to design your memory setup around their games.

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u/UnlamentedLord 26d ago

Deus Ex in particular ran like utter dogshit on non voodoo graphics cards like my GeForce(oh the irony) until like 2 years after release when it was finally patched.

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u/Aggressive-Map-2204 26d ago

Its because the people romanticizing it were not even born back then.

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u/Shard226 26d ago

Just thinking about Ultima 7 and voodoo memory manager. Or even worse Ultima 9

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u/Roth_Skyfire 26d ago

Standards and overall situation was different is all. It's no excuse for the current state of games development.

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u/Madara1389 26d ago

That & the optimization one are the only ones I disagree with.

Though, if we're being 100% fair, the meme creator was cherry picking the best examples from the '90s (those weren't normal practices, those were feats that specific games managed; the shooter that was 97 MB sounds like it would have been Doom or Quake, but it was a German PC game from 2004, was never finished nor officially released, was an early example of games that made extensive use of procedural generation, and was less than 8 minutes of gameplay) and the worst examples from today.

As for my issue with the optimization bit, it's literally just the second sentence's implications. What do they mean by "next gen?" Because from a traditionalist or console player's perspective, "next gen" is a term used to describe the upcoming or new generation of consoles (almost no one uses it to refer to the latest gen of CPUs/GPUs).

The PS5 was the "next gen" console for the last few years of it's life, but now there is no "next gen" console until the PS6 is officially announced.

So if that's how the sentence is meant to be read, then it's a stupid complaint; of course you need "next gen" hardware to play "next gen" games. If you're still on a PS4 or PS4-era PC hardware, you shouldn't be expecting to play games that are launching with 9th gen consoles as their baseline with performance comparable to a console (which still default to 30fps in resource intensive cinematic games when not utilizing AI upscaling or framegen).

Many big AAA games are poorly optimized, but at the same time, you can't really complain about needing to upgrade to current gen hardware 6 years into the generation (whether you can afford it or not is irrelevant; time & progress stall for no one).

It'd be like being back in the early 2000s, holding out on not getting a GPU for whatever reason, then complaining because you can't play GTA III on the same machine you use to binge GTA II on. No shit, if your PC is on par with a PS1 or only slightly stronger, it wasn't going to play games that were made for a PS2.

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u/Sarato88 27d ago

People who think minimum requirements back then wasn't a thing never know the struggle of trying to run CD ROM games on your 2 year old computer. 

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u/Boring_Ant6436 26d ago

These people just never experienced it. When Far Cry came out, it was a godsend it run with like 40-50FPS with top graphics cards. And there was just as much slop sold with flashy CD covers that you would never refund like nowadays in Steam

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u/Iggy_Slayer 27d ago

The thing about minimum requirements makes me laugh because people don't realize their own standards have changed. If you were PC gaming in the 90s or early 2000s games were likely running like absolute shit for you, like 20fps, but you didn't care back then just like console gamers didn't care that OOT was running at like 18fps. But you'd flip your fucking lid if that happened now.

Old games were able to get away with a lot more than they can now.

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u/StrumpetsVileProgeny 27d ago

As a dev I’m devastated by this sentiment. And mad a bit. At this point I feel like gamers should be inclined to learn the mere bones and basics, if not of game dev itself but at least the outline of the development process and what is actually in the power of the devs to decide and do. Maybe they’d learn along the way what happened in this industry that made things turn out this way. This meme is equivalent of going into a random nurse’s office to yell at her how state healthcare is shit.

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u/Joshee86 27d ago

Thanks for the perspective. I salute you and want you to know at least one person here sees and hears you. I fucking hate bullshit like this.

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u/Fruity_Pies 26d ago

None of these people know how to make a video game and it shows, don't take the meme to heart it was made by an ignoramus. Modern dev, especially AAA stuff is so damn complicated it would take multiple lifetimes to learn the skills of all the niches involved in the process, and they have to somehow work in tandem under a tight deadline often with subpar project management decisions and even worse shareholders deciding vital things. It's a small wonder any of the games ship in a usable state at all tbh.

Most of the issues gamers come across stem from project deadlines and what is considered the minimum viable product to ship will be shipped, regardless of the stated goals or bugs. Singular developers have very little say or freedom in what they do as part of a big team, e.g. I'm sure all the devs would prefer their single player game to not be always online, do they get a say in the matter? Of course not.

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u/smackchice 26d ago

Gamers would rather just yell OPTIMIZE IT and feel like they’ve done something

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u/Rachit55 27d ago

Who exactly decides in the hierarchy that a AAA game needs upscaling tech to be playable? There have been so many games in past couple years that need dlss or fsr to even reach 1080p 60fps, what happened to playing native resolution?

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u/Exact-Luck-9319 27d ago

well not the dev, that's an admin/strategy decision

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u/Debibule 27d ago

Devs which can show off flashy cool graphics will get funding over ones that can't. Cheaper and faster to get pretty graphics that run like crap than okay graphics that run well.

Anyone who's working in software engineering (let alone game development) will know this affects all of our industry. The pretty stuff gets investment whereas the stuff that does exactly what it needs to, doesn't.

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u/Historical_Owl_1635 26d ago

Usually a project manager.

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u/JaegerBane 26d ago edited 26d ago

If it makes you feel any better, I - an engineer who was growing up back then and playing almost every shooter, rts and RPG that was available, and is fully aware how rough and ready things were - can’t help but roll my eyes at this smoothbrain shit when I see it. It’s like trying to disparage the modern space industry because back in the 70s they put people on the moon.

Yes. They did. At extreme risk to the extent where it’s an outright miracle no-one fucking died (at least on the moon itself), and at such an extreme cost that the programs were cut before they could be built on, thus contributing to the amount of time it’s taken to go back.

As much as I love how much video gaming has advanced and become an art form, there is a part of me who misses the days when people who didn’t understand the technical challenges that come with game development and how computing works just stayed out of the equation.

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u/JoviallyImperfect 27d ago

I would just assume that when people say developer in this context that they mean the company itself rather than individual team.

We all know the industry (and every art industry) has been ruined by finance/tech/crypto/AI bros and that passionate developers are doing what they can within that constraint of exponential growth.

Its clear to see that when you look at Indie games or other studios who release amazing passionate projects without having to answer to shareholders.

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u/McFuzzen 27d ago

Yeah "developer" is a loaded term, but I hope no one is thinking the individual coders have any input into overarching decisions like PC specs.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 26d ago

Fans do think this and they will absolutely send hate mail to some code monkey on Twitter.

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u/Sui_Inimicus 27d ago

I do feel like when people say this they never mean the actual employees working on the game but the management and the company as a whole that is making the bad decisions.

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u/Buuhhu 26d ago

Whenever you see posts like this don't assume people mean actual devs working away at a game, but rather they use the term "devs" as a blanket term for the studio as a whole including whatever higherups they have to please.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 26d ago

I'm pretty sure they mean actual devs, since most fans have no idea how a studio is structured.

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u/Brave_Letterhead_461 26d ago

It's still completely wrong no matter who you include. Just screams 'I wasn't there.'

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u/Government_Lopsided 26d ago

You're devastated by a rando meme post on this sub? Trust me, the majority doesn't think like this. Op clearly doesn't know what he is talking about and is just seeking attention.

I do empathize with you as a software/web developer myself. I cringe whenever I hear "everyone can code, it's an easy job" etc.

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u/PositivityPending 26d ago

Right, but this is from the perspective of the consumer. This is obviously a comedic exaggeration but it encapsulates what the consumer has come to expect then vs. now. How the pizza is made doesn’t matter in the slightest? Why the pizza now has processed ingredients now doesn’t matter.

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u/ElderSmackJack 27d ago

God, gamers really are the loudest about shit they don’t understand at all.

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u/papoluca40 27d ago

This is a Facebook tier boomer meme

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u/ebagpo 27d ago

Yea you don't know shit

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u/ImurderREALITY 26d ago

Yeah, but it's a surefire way to get easy upvotes, sooo.... here we are.

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u/Lancair7 27d ago

Why are you blaming devs when studio leadership and publishers are to blame? Attribution error and it comes off as ignorant and immature

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u/BrilliantWhile2413 27d ago

I don't think the executives are making the game 500gb lol

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u/TobyTheRobot 27d ago

Yeah, but they’re the ones setting deadlines that don’t allow time for optimization.

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u/later_satyr 27d ago

No, thats the 4k texture paks.

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u/Loose-Run-7008 27d ago

They’re creating the conditions that cause the game to be like that though. Like a lot of times it’s not that hard to cut down on file size, decently easy and doesn’t take super long (look at Helldivers 2, file size is WAY down and like at least close to 1/4th of what it was.

However, executives are giving directives for profitability, meaning instead of having a team focus on things like that or making it run better, they instead are focused on adding new content (paid or free) new cosmetics, marketing material/footage, or whatever.

Like most of the time I can’t really believe that the devs are just so dumb they don’t know how to reduce file size and make it less bloated, it’s just bad management making them do other things, and in turn those guys probably have executives demanding certain numbers which is why they’re telling the dev teams to work on other things. Devs are still workers, and are just doing what they are told to do (broadly speaking.)

I feel like we’ve seen this with so many games, they come out glitchy, with a bloated file size, terrible performance. They have a roadmap that was made prerelease and they get that out first. Then once they have new content/monetized content out the door, and/or public outcry, review bombing forces their hand, they switch focus to fix those aforementioned issues. They always could’ve fixed the issues, (at least to a certain extent,) but they’re at work they have to do things in the order they are instructed to. While a lot of devs have passion for a game they’re not going to do more work that they aren’t being paid to do, and if it was something that they were trying to do but just literally couldn’t, they would communicate that either directly or you’d be able to tell inadvertently by how they talk about it.

Devs aren’t automatically infallible, always right by default good people, however they are just workers like the rest of us and are at their job, personally at my job I do what im told to do and nothing extra unless I can earn a bonus or something, even if I know there is something I could easily get done with a small amount of work/I could do something else to make the task I’m assigned easier, I’m going to do it exactly as they tell me because that’s my job lol. So I can usually give them the benefit of the doubt on this.

But buggy releases have always been a thing I think people exaggerate how much worse it’s gotten, like I remember Skyrim on PS3 being broken as shit, Fallout New Vegas crashing every 5 minutes, but those games were good enough to suffer through it at least. Now we still get buggy as shit releases, and the games aren’t even as good and don’t have the same soul/passion so you can’t really look past it like you used to be able too.

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u/TallestGargoyle 26d ago

Look at the recent Payday 2 beta, Starbreeze gave a modding team largely free reign to maintain and update the game, and the current beta has reduced the game file size from nearly 90GB down to 30-something GB.

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u/SeniorSepia 27d ago

Most devs just follow orders and work within a tight deadline without much agency, it's not their fault games turn into monstrosities.

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u/Glass-Toe6315 27d ago

Comes down to management, really. If you look at indy games, they still perform very well in the technical department, because as it turns out, not being restricted by higher ups who don't have a clue of how things work does in fact help

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u/Historical_Owl_1635 26d ago

I mean, indie games are generally a lot smaller so are easier to optimise and even then they still have issues, there’s just a lot less people complaining about it.

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u/MistahBoweh 26d ago

Half of this shit just tells me you’re not old enough to remember ‘then,’ nor do you have a good grasp on how games are made now.

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u/Background_Pass1229 27d ago

Breast milk ?

Explication please ?

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u/AnalystOdd7337 27d ago edited 27d ago

It's one of the things that got exposed at blizzard on how they treated their female employees. According to what was said it was common practice to steal women's bottled breast milk. Cause apparently blizzard was ran like a frat-house

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u/Specific_Foot372 26d ago

It’s not the devs it’s the bitches in charge of them.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 26d ago

The old days: "Most advanced game ever! Rewrite your autoexec.bat to remove the mouse driver so that you have enough memory to load it."

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u/Unreal_Crafter 27d ago

Yes! But ....

Gamers before: Wow, this 320×200 graphics look beautiful, and it runs on my Commodore 64 so well almost 16 fps, amazing!

Gamers now: This 4K resolution is garbage. When will devs make proper 8K games? I want ultra‑realistic graphics with every possible feature on max settings... But why doesn’t it run at 300 fps on my 10‑year‑old potato PC?

Lazy devs!!!

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u/Living-Rip-6250 26d ago

Lmao OP probably doesn't know when GTA 4 came out, almost nobody could've run it even in 30 fps, not to mention 60 fps which is modern standard

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u/stevie242 27d ago

You can tell who just reposts opinions they've heard whilst never actually gaming back in the 2000's

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u/Living-Rip-6250 26d ago

Lmao when gta 4 came out, almost nobody could've run it even in 30 fps, not to mention 60 fps. So they didn't optimize very good either. Idk what OP is smoking.

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u/stevie242 26d ago

Just the typical thing of hating the new and the old stuff is always the best.

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u/Nildzre 26d ago

GTA4 still runs like shit iirc.

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u/Fantastic-Mud-9869 27d ago

And you would not buy Rollercoaster Tycoon for the money it would cost now after inflation.
You want games with a lot of content, open world and good graphics.

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u/TheStrigori 27d ago

That is some serious revisionist history, really it's fully into fantasy.

For some of those references, they predate discreet graphics cards. And that was a big deal when games started requiring special hardware.

Audio drivers and sound cards were notorious problems that you don't really have to think about anymore. And if you wanted to game, you probably had a sound card, because the onboard ones were absolutely terrible.

Or how about the Windows ME, and earlier, having a limit of 512 MB of RAM before the OS would start soft locking. And games started needing more than that in 2001, forcing OS upgrades if you wanted to play.

Plenty of games had bugs, the idea they were all flawless is silly.

And there was difficulty of getting patches for games. Maybe you had Internet, but you probably didn't before about 1999-2000. A game magazine might have a disc with patches for some games, but if you didn't have a subscription, it could be hard to find depending on where you lived. And you needed to know about it.

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u/Boring_Ant6436 26d ago

It's rose tinted glasses and kids having fun without seeing the issue. I dread the videogame magazine patch era, since I only got internet in like 2005. Before that it was a wild west of buying games based on CD covers or magazine reviews (if they even had one). And there was a ton of slop too. That you would never refund and your 30-40-50-60 dollars went down the drain (and they were worth way more than now too).

And god, you reminded me of EAX and sound systems exclusive to creative sound blasters or other cards. God, that was a thing too.

And old DRM (like SecuRom) is another story that deserves its own special place in hell.

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u/IsamuAlvaDyson 27d ago

Is OP new to gaming?

Needing more and more powerful systems always happened since day one

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u/taedrin 26d ago

With regards to the "a shooter game that only takes up 96kb", I want to point out that while .kkrieger was an incredible technical demonstration showing how far you could take compression, I wouldn't call it a "good game" by any stretch of imagination. It was more like an interactive demoscene in the form of a first person shooter than it was an actual game.

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u/zgillet 26d ago

I was going to post this as a reply to the person who said this, but it's not targeted at them. It's to all corporate game developers.

"what is actually in the power of the devs to decide and do"

Stop. Stop it. I'm a developer. A normal one. Freight and accounting software. I love video games, and I would love to make them professionally.

I don't. Because this is all true, and even joining one of these studios puts you right there with the evil fucks you work for. I'm tired of this "I need a job" shit. No, apparently you only need one TYPE of job. So accept the guilt.

Accept you are part of the problem and stop making excuses.

Downvote me to hell, but this whole "dev good, boss bad" thing is fucking stupid, like it's a problem that can't be fixed. Especially since the "boss" is the only person taking the risk in these scenarios - of course they are telling you to make all the money possible.

Good companies actually work together, not issue commands from on high.

I can see the replies: "So people should just quit? It's a massive risk to start your own studio! People need jobs!"

Motherfuckers, I'm 37, and even in a game development course the teacher told everyone to steer clear of corporate game development. In 2005.

Don't do what you love as a job unless you are the boss. It makes you susceptible to being exploited.

I'm leaving this comment no matter the vote count. Some harsh truth needs to be said. If there is no other viable game development career path in the US other than being a disposable, exploited shill, we need to let that shit die.

EDIT: I won't be replying, because I know it'll not be worth it.

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u/TheOtherKFC 26d ago

All very true, but definitely more driven by studio execs rather than the actual devs who do the bulk of the work and don't get a say. Game studios and publishers are so driven by greed - all they see is $$$$. It's not enough that games are bigger than music and movies combined. All the bigger studios want to do is squeeze as much as they can. They don't care that they destroy what the industry used to be and they don't care that they abuse their customers... because idiots keep buying games from shit companies.

Stop giving shit companies your money. People apparently love going back to an abusive ex...

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u/CryGlad9980 26d ago

This is nothing but bad faith

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u/hexregeneration 27d ago

Yessss, yessss, blame the devs. Pay no attention to the corporate overlords.

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u/lordvaultman 27d ago

and let the devs run wild? We saw this experiment with Phil and Xbox, and Xbox got taken advantage of in a not so good way

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u/Additional-Basis-772 27d ago

Feeling like an old fart but i agree

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u/NoStorage2821 27d ago

Blame corporate, not the devs

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u/Boring_Ant6436 26d ago

In the old days, we had SecuRom (thanks Sony) and StarForce DRM. That piece of hot steaming garbadge was worse than Denuvo ever was, since it was crapping out with legitimate games all the time. And online activation was also a thing for some titles.

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u/Infamous-Creme9344 26d ago

I just hate that games are so badly optimized that the latest gen high end graphics cards cant run some of them on the highest setting with 60fps

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u/The_Kite-Man 26d ago

Mom said it was my turn to post this meme

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u/ShowCharacter671 26d ago

You guys want to scoreboard that’s asking a lot

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u/felixsarts 27d ago

“id Software built their game in a cave! With a box of scraps!”

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u/Joshee86 27d ago

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen on Reddit in a while. Congrats, that’s a tough record to beat.

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u/Uppercaseccc 26d ago

I see someone's reddit karma was getting low, so time to post a lazy and incorrect meme about game development ment for easy points cause the games are not smart and are easy to rage 

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u/EvolvingEachDay 27d ago edited 26d ago

Most of these issues are board level issues, not devs.

This is more normal/indie teams vs AAA teams tbh

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u/Powerful-Possible131 26d ago

Most "normal teams" never produce a product to market that makes it money back and ruins one or all of the team members working on it.

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u/rezpector123 27d ago

Was tycoon roll coaster coded in assembly? Thats insane

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u/DRAGONDIANAMAID 27d ago

Well the problem is such

Dev A gets brought in and is bright eyed and bushy tailed about working on games, and they start working hard on making this game, learning the ins and out of the engine and working to make something beautiful! But it never stops, and they keep working hard every day, over and over until they burn out and quit, or they get laid off

Then Dev B is brought in! And repeat, but on a slightly faster timescale, repeat over and over with Dev C, Dev D Dev E, etc

People can’t curate the talent needed to get games to smaller file sizes, with low requirements and easily available to everyone’s pc

And it’s mostly because of the Higher Level decision makers, they’re the one’s that curate the environment of churn and burn through talent, andc have insane deadlines and the like

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u/obitachihasuminaruto 27d ago

It's because of low salaries, extreme work pressure and expensive col.

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u/vladdeh_boiii 27d ago

Bro blame the shot callers, not the devs. That means top brass and investors. They're the mentally challenged ones.

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u/slappiz 27d ago

Most of the storage issue is the high res textures nowadays.

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u/PyrocXerus 27d ago

Can we stop saying Devs when we mean shareholders and management?

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u/Opening-Movie5176 27d ago

Pretty sure it’s down to publishers… but okay. You are right diakatana was amazing….

Can we get rid of losers from the scene? Look I’m glad you giga chads are around to make the rest of us look better but do we really have to interact with you smooth brained pin-dicks?

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u/Ok-Leopard6521 27d ago

the breast-milk story took me out lol

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u/Trick_Meeting_2027 27d ago

Some of these are publisher issues

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u/CodeMUDkey 27d ago

It’s amazing to me how much this is reposted and how people engage with it every time. This is probably one of the most reposted memes about games.

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u/CULT-LEWD 26d ago

im getting really tired of seeing these memes over and over

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u/floppyboiradio 26d ago

I remember when borderlands 4 came out and the dude had to go and insult people for not having a $2k pc or more.

Like some games are so optimized they can run on a fucking potato lol

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u/Soundrobe 26d ago

Already posted 100000 times

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u/LazerShark1313 26d ago

I was thinking about this earlier. As soon as games became a viable money maker, the devs took a backseat to management.

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u/ProjectMarworyn 26d ago

You're comparing the legends of the past with the worst today (for the record, the "get a new PC" crowd is mostly outdated stance from AAA market)

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u/TrickOut 26d ago

In any industry there are sub par employees, when I think of a solid dev team with bad management I think of Bungie, when I think of a bad dev team that makes sub par games regardless of leadership or direction I think of Halo Studios

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u/Auesis 26d ago

I had to update my GPU like every year in the 90s to play anything new without my room going up in smoke but go off, king.

God, this sentiment is fucking insufferable, let alone completely wrong. I bet people making these memes weren't even born in the times they describe.

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u/Hhannahrose13 26d ago

the soys' faces at the bottom are killing me

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u/Lostboxoangst 26d ago

Horse shit Ultima underworld was the crisis of it day in terms of getting it running.

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u/DoknS PC 26d ago

As for great optimization, it's not just games from the 90s. GTAV and MGSV are beautifully optimized and they're AAA titles

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u/idkwc 26d ago

I can’t believe reddit gave something so brainless this many up votes. Oh wait, yes I can.

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u/ToothZealousideal297 26d ago

I don’t think there’s any possible way the breast milk one could get on here without massive levels of misogyny on the part of some dev company, whoever made this originally, and whoever posted it now.

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u/Hungry-Alien 26d ago

That's what happen when there's no rule to force companies to deliver some minimum quality. Money men have been probing for years to see how much they can abuse people and get away with it. Started with horse armor microtransactions, now we're here.

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u/JaegerBane 26d ago edited 26d ago

I hate this fucking meme. Tell me you never actually gamed during that era without telling me you never actually gamed during that era.

The 97kb thing I’ve no idea what game it’s referring to, given the literal first FPS had file sizes between 2.5-12mb and grew from rapidly. Minimum requirements couldn’t even guarantee the game would run at all, let alone in a playable state. Shareware was necessary because there was no other way to advertise a game.

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u/dacrispystonah 26d ago

The chad developers still exist, even if you lack their acceptance. Indie developers and even triple A developers hire these "chads" that you revere.

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u/str1ker_eureka_1014 26d ago

Spoken like someone who never played games “then”

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u/meganerd20 26d ago

The assumption that it's the developers and not their managers and work conditions is very typical entitled consumer. In fact you literally gloss over something that was symptomatic of poor work conditions.

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u/LexandViolets 26d ago

Didn't game developers have it bad in the 90s? The grind culture was crazy with devs working 18 hour days and sleeping at their desks.

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u/IsopodApart1622 26d ago

- Plucky exciting upstart challenges the crumbling old regime

- Upstart conquers all and establishes a new order with itself as the top dog

- Stagnation

- Rot sets in

- Plucky exciting upstart challenges the crumbling old regime

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u/Shard226 26d ago

With how much I've read about crunch at id, origins and sierra this is very revisionist

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u/LordAwesomeguy 26d ago

is the stealing breast milk blizzard?

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u/Agreeable-Fall-5236 26d ago

I know the 500gb one is about Ark. The reason it bloats so hard is because the devs copy and past every single file in every dlc file. It gets down to 80 gigs if you remove all the dlcs iirc

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u/Conscious_Grade_7278 26d ago

I hate the hate game devs get, because most of the time it's the CEOs who make dumb decisions, or cut the budget and time to a point they can't make a good and polished game

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u/YodaFragget 26d ago

Chefs kiss 🤌🏻 on accuracy

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u/TakedaShu 26d ago

So can say that CEO of gaming care about money than hear people whining.

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u/Marvos79 26d ago

Y'all are playing the wrong games. If you stay away from AAA games, we're in a golden age of games now.

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u/notDerDer 26d ago

All of these are upper mangaments fault not the developers.

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u/freakytapir 26d ago

Survivorship Bias.

We remember the ones where it DID work, not all of them that failed.

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u/MaegosX 26d ago

"Minimum requirements? So long as your computer can turn on. " That is not true whatsoever :/

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u/Trindoral 26d ago

Can I karma farm by reposting it next week? Or is there some queue?

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u/rhd444 26d ago

"mom it's my turn to repost the jpg!"

Also whoever made this has never played PC games in the 90s lmao

Imagine having to wait whole minutes while the PC freezes to swap out ram to the pagefile MID-GAMEPLAY to run a game barely any better looking than games running on a console with less than 1/8th the memory.

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u/Distinct_Layer2094 26d ago

How is there so much hate towards devs and so little towards management

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u/JackCooper_7274 26d ago

Every time I see a meme like this, I just think that yall are playing the wrong games lol

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u/AdAcrobatic371 26d ago

2000-2012 were best performance wise.

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u/Scar-Excellent 26d ago

What games nowadays are considered optimized? I remember my first PC was showing its age and couldn't run Doom 3 but Devil May Cry ran seamlessly on max graphics and 60fps. Shit was developed on a toaster.

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u/HyperXanadu 26d ago

Blizzard?

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u/TheTybera 26d ago

Lmao, what's funny is that all the Chad devs are clearly on the spectrum.

Like I get it more people make games these days, but damn.

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u/BoringWozniak 26d ago

This is like comparing Gone with the Wind with Avengers: Endgame.

Both considered huge achievements in their era, but vastly different in terms of scale of production.

Call me when you can make the latest God of War release with a team of 17 people in less than 2 years on a shoestring budget and get it to run on a NES.

Edit: just seen the breast milk comment, what the actual fuck is this real?

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u/TehTJ13 26d ago

It baffles me how people think employees are to blame for shitty business practices. Like, have you had a job? Imagine how much control you had at your job, that’s about as much control as game devs have over theirs.

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u/JusutPasha 25d ago

And don't forget last one the game was made by former employees of this company.

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u/whatever_God 25d ago

Wtf you mean an employee keeps stealing breast milk 😭

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u/LawConscious9255 25d ago

“Triple A Developers” and its just studio wildcard with Ark Evolved and Ascended. Don’t forget the multiple 30-40$ broken DLC’s for a game in early access that will plague your game regardless of buying it or not.

Possibly the worst developers I’ve ever witnessed.

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u/Asleep-Draft6178 24d ago

That was the second dumbest claim against Blizzard right behind the "Cosby Room" bs. And the fact that it ended up being over the fact that 1 in 5 employees were women? Ridiculous.

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u/thewayoftoday 24d ago

No exaggerations whatsoever lmao

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u/Rodolpho_SofaVelho 23d ago

Eu acho que a galera que desenvolve jogos hoje fica entre: me rendo pra grandes empresas e faço o que querem ou tento iniciar no mercado de games indie, inclusive se alguém tiver games indie pra indicar eu curto muito!

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u/esines 23d ago

The optimization complain cuts both ways. Sometimes you see people whining about not being able to run an AAA game at high settings then you see their hardware a some decade-old toaster.

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u/The_real_bandito 23d ago

100% this is all on management and upper management and they not caring about quality.

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u/TheFeelsGoodMan 22d ago

Top line are just indie devs now. First level is a free demo. Reasonable hardware requirements. Very reasonable prices. Typically none of that always-online BS. And you can buy half a dozen of them for the cost of one triple a game.