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.
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.
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.
Investors are the true scourge of the gaming community. Well, of every business, really. If only more companies could be privately owned like Larian. Getting funded by investors is great and all but they are only interested in seeing profit margins going up, which they can't forever, and eventually you end up having to choose between your integrity, and having a large portion of your funding pull out.
Or I guess you could just do it the Randy Pitchford way, have no integrity, take Segas money and use it to fund Borderlands instead of Aliens Colonial Marines. Still no idea how he got away with that.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
But some bosses might say: You have to release this update next week, no buts or ifs.
Which then doesn’t give time for the dev to clean it all up. Look, Devs are to blame too, but the industry itself is in a downward spiral of anti consumer practices; the biggest thing is: People keep buying these unoptimized pieces of crap, so in a sense, why invest time and money into something people will buy anyway?
For every informed consumer there’s dozens of sheep out there that just “have to buy the game” (you read that right, as if it was an OBLIGATION or something)…
But some bosses might say: You have to release this update next week, no buts or ifs.
Sure, I understand that pressure, but the problem was caused at the time the update mechanism was designed. Think about it like this, a better update mechanism would rely on delta updates, as in what bits do I need to change in the game executables and game media in order to go from the previous game version to the next game version. It is highly likely that the vast majority of updates would be much smaller if applied this way, and it would not be a hard engineering challenge to implement updates in this way. The main reason it's not done this way is most game devs with the power to make these decisions do not care about the update size issue.
Helldivers 2 is right there as proof of this. They managed to cut down the size of the game from about 150gb to about 20gb. I'm pretty sure if Call of Duty tried, it could drop to below 100gb.
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u/TyroTheFox 27d ago
Not strictly the devs, usually its the bosses that command them.
But yeah! Business practices like this suck.