Hi, this is a quick post I make to talk about something I keep seeing online everywhere.
A lot of people say that the price increases will force developers to optimize and to work with what hardware they have to make good games and stop using AI gen and DLSS tech as an excuse for poor optimization.
The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don’t have the hardware right now.
Those people that were waiting for a discount to buy a PS5 or a PC and now they’re left stranded.
Current-gen consoles are getting really hard to find and a lot of people have been left out, stuck on old-gen and old-games.
playing old-games is not a bad thing but you may have missed the fact that even old consoles are getting reaaally pricey thanks to scalpers and speculators of the market.
This is madness people. Fight AI, don’t embrace it!
Modern developers simply were not ever taught the old ways. The old ways are light years ahead in terms of optimization and efficiency than what modern developers can even imagine. Imagine creating a C compiler and it has to run in 16KB of RAM and be powerful enough to build unxz, untar and sha256sum. Because it was done because they needed it.
They’re also not really comparable. Teams were so small and project timelines were so short that you often knew exactly what the end would look like. My favorite optimization story from 20+ years ago is that a dev (who went nameless, and so did the game, as the story was posted anonymously) made a habit of declaring a large empty variable at the beginning of a project, and that variable’s only job was to be deleted when they encroached on their memory budget so they knew when to stop.
That someone thought Electron was a not just a reasonable approach but a good idea, when it sucks down a gig of RAM for what amounts to mIRC with GIFs, is a strong support of your claim.
Optimizing for development time is a worthy pursuit as well.
mIRC with gifs? Some people thought it was a good idea to use it as a game engine! It was used for e.g. Shapez
Slack was one of the earliest Electron apps. Then Teams.
They pay for dev time, the extra energy costs and worse experience to the user are t in their budget.
They all work for big companies, and in big companies you get paid for features not for fixes.
AAA games will never be optimized. They’re too big to care, and nobody is accountable for it.
This is why I quit big companies. I love optimizing. I love building flexible software, that’s fast, clean, and simple. But that takes time and you won’t get it, you’ll get “what’s the minimum we can do to get this feature out” or “we can always come back to that” and it’s back logged forever. If someone else pushes out a hacky MVP of spaghetti code that gets to market faster, they’ll go with that, even if it costs months of dedicated fixes.