[dijit]

I work in gamedev, historically AAA gamedev.

If you think that the programmers are unmotivated (lazy) or incompetent; you’re wrong on both counts.

The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

The issue is that games have such high expectations that they didn’t have before.

There are very few “yearly titles” that allow you to nail down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where unit/integration tests would be completely useless the minute they were built.

The industry will end, but not because of “lazy devs”, its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological contingent of people using games as a (bad) political vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be laid off if they can’t eventually generate revenue.

—-

Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game didn’t work, you assumed you needed better hardware and you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it doesn’t work on something from before COVID the consensus is that it is not optimised enough. I’m not casting aspersions at the mindset, but it’s a different mentality.

[gmueckl]

Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how much work and effort a game requires these days to meet even the minimum expectations they have.

[imcritic]

That's bullshit. I don't care about graphics, I play lots of indie games, some of them are made by a single person. There are free game engines, so basically all one needs for a successful game is just a good idea for the game.

And a friend of mine still mostly plays the goddamn Ultima Online, the game that was released 28 years ago.

[dijit]

and if a new game came out today that looked and played the same as Ultima online… What would you (and the rest of gamers) think about it?

Your expectations of that game are set appropriately. Same with a lot of Indy games, the expectation can be that its in early access for a decade+. You would never accept that from, say, Ubisoft.

[imcritic]

Depends on what that game brings, I might like it a lot. Again, me and all my friends love indie games, most of them with pixel graphics or just low polygon. The market for such games is big enough. Just look up some popular indie games sales estimations.

[gmueckl]

You are a minor share of the overall market and the sad truth is that most indie games sell a pityfull handfull of copies and can't sustain their creators financially. And even indie games have to meet certain standards and given that they are developed nostly by single devs, meeting even those "minimal" standards takes years for many devs.

[sombragris]

> The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

I fully agree and I really admire people working on the industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware requirements, I understand game devs are simply responding to internal trends within the industry, and especially going for a practical outcome by using an established game engine (such as Unreal 5).

But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same industry to allocate time and resources either at the engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a realistic low end.

[dijit]

the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the low end).

I don’t think any company that has given up their internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without even having revenue from a game to show for it.

So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will release their engines on license… but Unreal will eat them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME). Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue (against investment for any other purpose).

All this to say, I’m sorry to disappoint you, its very unlikely.

Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.

[sombragris]

I'm not implying at all that every game company should develop their own in-house engine.

But maybe, just maybe, they could request Epic or Unity to optimize their engines better for the lower end.

[dijit]

You cant optimise the general case

Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.

If you are a general engine, you can’t easily make those tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and tooling for many cases, slowing things down further.

The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools from Epic, but they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since borderlands.