[franknine]

I think in the GTAV case, they kind of dropped the ball by not doing profiling when players complained. The exact same thing happened to our game as well, it was also a Json deserializing library that caused the problem. At the first release, the player’s save files were small, so we didn’t notice the library was written poorly. After several expansions, the save data grew, some players contacted support complaining about start up loading time. We did a profile, found the culprit, migrated data to Bson format, done.

Back to the question. If there is a limited amount of time before release and I have to choose between fixing load time and fixing framerate. It’s definitely going to be framerate, some console platforms will reject your title if you frame drop multiple times within certain duration. Frame drop is also a deal breaker for most players especially for VR games. Stuttering can cause serious motion sickness in VR and make people throw up.

Overall I think the constraints of game projects are different to other domains like web and business. So we game developers tend to think differently. Like bugs are bad, but as long as not game breaking/save corrupting or happening way too often, players are kind of ok with that. People even found bugs in game entertaining and compiled a weekly reel of bugs https://kotaku.com/c/video/highlight-reel. On the other hand, performance is critical to us, if a game plays sluggish then no one can enjoy it. Compared to the web where users have more tolerance about rending speed.