[denkmoon]

>Games are basically a solved problem these days

I... have you played games at all recently? Have you seen the recent major releases? BF2042, Cyberpunk, etc. Even the highest quality game studios (not the aforementioned) have trouble making good high quality releases, especially with consistency.

Games are certainly not a solved problem.

[dzonga]

people in the tech industry like to overestimate their own skills.

we see the same attitude in software industry - somethin' that has existed since the 60s that software is solved problem. yet everyone has difficulties in shippin' software that actually works whether that's titans like Apple / Microsoft to small mom and pop shops.

Games the difficulty is two-fold. 1: games are an art - and making art to good taste is a complex problem. 2. games are software - thereby suffering from problems encountered by the regular software industry etc lack of labour / resourcing etc

[Cthulhu_]

re: Cyberpunk, they tried to solve it again - over-estimating their own abilities to build a game engine (like they did with the Witcher games before) and ending up getting the basics wrong (e.g. resource loading on lower-end systems like the PS4).

[KptMarchewa]

Performance is by far not the only problem with Cyberpunk, although the most visible one.

[dawnbreez]

Games SHOULD be a solved problem. There is no good reason for us to have to reinvent the wheel over and over. There are compsci white papers that neatly solve all of the big problems games run into.

But games are not a solved problem. There are multiple overlapping reasons why.

One is that gamedevs often just don't do the research. Why would they? The deadlines loom, the milestones have to be delivered, nobody cares if it's a hacky mess right now, surely management will give us time to fix it once they realize that it's broken--but if we don't deliver anything, the publisher cuts our funding.

This overlaps with scheduling and management issues. It turns out that writing good software takes up time[1], and the problem with games in particular is that they don't make money until they're released.

You don't write games like you write business software, where the other company paying for your milestones is the company that's going to use the software; that company usually has a revenue stream even without your software, so they don't have to care as much. For a game, though, there IS no revenue stream until the game launches. Every year that a game is in development without a release is a loss, and that pisses the board of directors right the fuck off, so that means the game needs to be out ASAP.

Because of this, games are often not given enough room in the development schedule to be made correctly. There's no time for research, testing, planning, or any of the other important parts of software engineering--we have to write this code NOW, or it doesn't ship. And if you read that source I linked in the footnote, you'll know that this produces rotten software.

This is compounded by the kind of one-upsmanship that is created by such an environment--leading to a phrase I've heard from friends in other companies: "Very optimistic people who are no longer with the company made this decision". You get into a situation where people made promises to impress the publisher, claiming that they can turn out a game in an impossible timeframe, and that got them fired--but now you're stuck cleaning up the mess, and the publisher has already wasted a lot of money on the years spent thinking it wasn't a mess.

Mix in the siloing of information (because all of this shit is proprietary) and, despite all of the problems being solved on paper, nobody's solved video games.

[1]: https://jacobian.org/2022/sep/9/quality-is-systemic/