Game devs on trial - considerations on current game technical quality and causes *spawn

[BitByte]

Maybe there is something not properly translating through pics and videos, but this looks like a middle of the road, last gen game. Perhaps one or more of the settings at max is doing something silly, but needing a 4080+/7900xt+ to maintain 60fps at 1440p DLSS/FSR quality is insane. It's becoming increasingly difficult not to hold the viewpoint that optimization in most modern games has gone out the window.

I mean it was obvious to those using their eyes. We have some folks doing their darnedest to try and convince of otherwise but, it won’t work. Optimization in todays games or the lack there of consist of using fsr/dlss and calling it a day. Absolutely lazy and borderline incompetent it’s not even funny. I’ve been saying for a while that there’s a serious skill issue going on in the gaming industry and it’s very hard to ignore. This is even more prevalent in the console space. When you begin to look at what devs accomplished on the likes of the 360/ps3 and to a certain extent the ps4, it’s hard to reconcile that with what we’re seeing on these new gen consoles.

This is not to say that it applies to all devs but, the standard of quality imo has dropped when it comes to performance. It’s frankly just so poor.

 

[RobertR1]

I mean it was obvious to those using their eyes. We have some folks doing their darnedest to try and convince of otherwise but, it won’t work. Optimization in todays games or the lack there of consist of using fsr/dlss and calling it a day. Absolutely lazy and borderline incompetent it’s not even funny. I’ve been saying for a while that there’s a serious skill issue going on in the gaming industry and it’s very hard to ignore. This is even more prevalent in the console space. When you begin to look at what devs accomplished on the likes of the 360/ps3 and to a certain extent the ps4, it’s hard to reconcile that with what we’re seeing on these new gen consoles.

This is not to say that it applies to all devs but, the standard of quality imo has dropped when it comes to performance. It’s frankly just so poor.

The PS3/360 era had a lot of games there were sub 720p. You can look up history here and it's what started the pixel counting craze. https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/list-of-rendering-resolutions.41152/ You were left to the hardware scaler in the device to upscale to desired resolution. PS4 era had checkerboard rendering.

This generation, we have IHV backed upscaling but unfortunately all consoles are limited to FSR variants. Perhaps that'll change with UE5.

You have good and bad devs every generation and this is no different. Not every sub 720p game was pushing the technical limits.

Ultimately the upside today is better. The upscaling tech is constantly being worked on and improved. Compare gen 1 DLSS upscaling to day. It's night n day. With upscaling tech, we're now (on PC) able to play ray/path traced games in realtime. Something that wasn't even a conversation point 5 years ago before Turning. So DLSS/FSR is a resource. How a dev chooses to use it; as a way to push the limits or phone it in, is upto them.

 

[Seanspeed]

Optimization in todays games or the lack there of consist of using fsr/dlss and calling it a day. Absolutely lazy and borderline incompetent it’s not even funny.

I swear 'lazy devs' should straight up be a ban-worthy comment any place where discussion is supposed to be at least somewhat serious about technical aspects of games. The sheer disrespect you're throwing at people who work very hard on this stuff is shameful.

The only thing lazy here is the thought process behind your claim.

 

[BitByte]

I swear 'lazy devs' should straight up be a ban-worthy comment any place where discussion is supposed to be at least somewhat serious about technical aspects of games. The sheer disrespect you're throwing at people who work very hard on this stuff is shameful.

The only thing lazy here is the thought process behind your claim.

The disrespect is not unearned. If you put out garbage, it’ll be called garbage. If you put a gem, it’ll be praised. I’m not here to coddle people’s feelings. I spend my hard earned money to fund their work so if I feel slighted at what is put out, I’ll call it out.

If I break the build at work, I’ll catch flack for it. If we push out a release and the portion I worked on is buggy, I’ll catch heavy flack for it. It’s called craftsmanship and it’s no different than any product that’s put out on earth today. I’m not sure why you think game devs are a protected class of citizens immune from criticism.

 

[Seanspeed]

The disrespect is not unearned. If you put out garbage, it’ll be called garbage. If you put a gem, it’ll be praised. I’m not here to coddle people’s feelings. I spend my hard earned money to fund their work so if I feel slighted at what is put out, I’ll call it out.

If I break the build at work, I’ll catch flack for it. If we push out a release and the portion I worked on is buggy, I’ll catch heavy flack for it. It’s called craftsmanship and it’s no different than any product that’s put out on earth today. I’m not sure why you think game devs are a protected class of citizens immune from criticism.

I did not say developers are immune from criticism or anything like that. It's telling that you'd frame my comment like this, while ignoring what I'm actually saying.

DEVELOPERS ARE NOT LAZY. In fact, game development is literally notorious for long hours and crunch, especially in the last 6-12 months before release. All while games literally take longer than ever to make, so each developer is typically devoting many years of their lives working on an individual project.

This narrative that they just dont care and dont actually bother to optimize their games at all is absolutely absurd. THAT is what I'm railing against here, because it's not just an embarrassingly terrible take, it's incredibly disrespectful. Games are so ambitious and complex to make, and you seem to literally have no appreciation for this whatsoever.

 

[BitByte]

DEVELOPERS ARE NOT LAZY. In fact, game development is literally notorious for long hours and crunch, especially in the last 6-12 months before release.

Yes game development is notorious for long hours but so are a lot of other professions. Im very intimately familiar with the strains put on you when you work 60-80 hour weeks for extended periods of time to meet project deadlines. The effects it has on you mentally, on your morale and on your personal life. What you fail to understand is that we're judged relative to our peers. If others are faced with the same constraints as you and you perform significantly worse, you'll be judged harshly regardless of the constraints you faced.

All while games literally take longer than ever to make, so each developer is typically devoting many years of their lives working on an individual project.

This is a self imposed problem. Unlike other professions, game development is one of the few professions where you get the freedom in choosing what you'll build as a collective. You get to choose the scope, the depth, the feature set. If you choose to spend 8 years building a game, that's your personal problem. Other devs are spitting out games every 3 years. Some are doing it even annually. Finally, game development is notorious for horrific project management.

This narrative that they just dont care and dont actually bother to optimize their games at all is absolutely absurd. THAT is what I'm railing against here, because it's not just an embarrassingly terrible take, it's incredibly disrespectful. Games are so ambitious and complex to make, and you seem to literally have no appreciation for this whatsoever.

You do not get rewarded for your effort, you get rewarded for your work. Do not conflate the two. If you expend a lot of effort and produce nonsense like the saints row devs, you get closed down. It's a business not a charity and in the end, only results matter. It doesn't matter if you care if the results are poor. Your care is essentially useless. I realize that my judgement is extremely harsh but do not make the mistake of assuming that I do not have first experience with the complexities of game development. It's a harsh business and it's not for everyone. That being said, things are much better now than it was in the ps360 days.

 

[trinibwoy]

Yes game development is notorious for long hours but so are a lot of other professions. Im very intimately familiar with the strains put on you when you work 60-80 hour weeks for extended periods of time to meet project deadlines. The effects it has on you mentally, on your morale and on your personal life. What you fail to understand is that we're judged relative to our peers. If others are faced with the same constraints as you and you perform significantly worse, you'll be judged harshly regardless of the constraints you faced.

Well said. I don’t understand the sentiment on this board that game developers need special sympathy as if the rest of us don’t work hard, spend long hours at the office, are subject to whims of management or otherwise have complicated jobs. Nobody gets a pass just because their job is hard. Game developers aren’t special in that respect.

And as you said much of the pain in the gaming industry is self imposed due to poor scope, timeline and resource management.

 

[Subtlesnake]

Well said. I don’t understand the sentiment on this board that game developers need special sympathy as if the rest of us don’t work hard, spend long hours at the office, are subject to whims of management or otherwise have complicated jobs. Nobody gets a pass just because their job is hard. Game developers aren’t special in that respect.

And as you said much of the pain in the gaming industry is self imposed due to poor scope, timeline and resource management.

None of the elements you list are explicitly "laziness". And people seem to use the term "lazy devs" to avoid actually having to analyse what went wrong in a given development process.

It is, unironically, a lazy response to complex set of issues.

 

[trinibwoy]

None of the elements you list are explicitly "laziness". And people seem to use the term "lazy devs" to avoid actually having to analyse what went wrong in a given development process.

It is, unironically, a lazy response to complex set of issues.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention anything about laziness. I also agree it’s unhelpful, reductive and lazy to blame software issues and delays on laziness.

 

[DavidGraham]

I am pretty sure "lazy devs" is an outdated term to describe the situation, it's a stereotype, and should be replaced with stuff like "unskilled devs", "badly managed devs", "half assed job", "rushed job", "poorly funded" .. etc.

The problem with the gaming industry is the lack of standards of practice, and the lack of strict credentials to practice that practice. In my medical field, I can't do anything without having the proper credentials for it and the training hours that prove I have that credential, I get tested on a practical and theoretical basis all the time, and I also get peer reviewed constantly. When there is a suspicion of malpractice or misdiagnosis, the complaint is taken seriously, and a committee of my peers will do a serious investigation to figure out what happened, and whose to blame. None of that happens in the gaming sector.

I don't get the long crunching hour defense either, us in the medical sector work longer than anyone else, I've seen colleagues work 96 hours a week, I myself have had to work 120 hours a week for extended periods of time to get stuff done in my career.

I don't call for censorship or anything of that matter, but I would really prefer if developers have the proper credentials to do a certain project before they do it, and not just "wing" it as they go along. I would also prefer for devs to have a considerable training hours/experience on similar projects. Also peer reviews should be a common practice in the gaming sector, maybe establish a body of industry veterans for each platform (PC/Xbox/PS) to analyze the games before their release date to ensure they meet a minimum of quality standards.

Something must be done, because the quality of the gaming industry is going down the drain.

 

[arandomguy]

I think it's more accurate and fair to question what type of priority, resources, focus, and etc. that the people in lead positions in development are assigning to the optimization issue. Especially specific ones, such as for instance whether are aware of shader compilation stutters, whether/how they tested for it, and what they did to mitigate the issue.

Treating the term "lazy devs" literally as in the actual individual work ethics of the people involved in these large scale products just doesn't really make any sense and isn't very constructive.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yes game development is notorious for long hours but so are a lot of other professions. Im very intimately familiar with the strains put on you when you work 60-80 hour weeks for extended periods of time to meet project deadlines. The effects it has on you mentally, on your morale and on your personal life. What you fail to understand is that we're judged relative to our peers. If others are faced with the same constraints as you and you perform significantly worse, you'll be judged harshly regardless of the constraints you faced.

This is a self imposed problem. Unlike other professions, game development is one of the few professions where you get the freedom in choosing what you'll build as a collective. You get to choose the scope, the depth, the feature set. If you choose to spend 8 years building a game, that's your personal problem. Other devs are spitting out games every 3 years. Some are doing it even annually. Finally, game development is notorious for horrific project management.

You do not get rewarded for your effort, you get rewarded for your work. Do not conflate the two. If you expend a lot of effort and produce nonsense like the saints row devs, you get closed down. It's a business not a charity and in the end, only results matter. It doesn't matter if you care if the results are poor. Your care is essentially useless. I realize that my judgement is extremely harsh but do not make the mistake of assuming that I do not have first experience with the complexities of game development. It's a harsh business and it's not for everyone. That being said, things are much better now than it was in the ps360 days.

I think game dev tends to be very top down, and publishers can make demands. That's not unique to game dev, and I'd never excuse a company for putting out a bad game. From the outside we have no idea what the reasons for a particular failure are. Project mismanagement, lack of talent, lack of resources or whatever. I'd generally limit my critique to the actual product vs attacking the devs or whatever. A lot of people are working at companies trying to make things better but they're slamming their heads against the wall because their attempts are innefectual because of the company structure, outside demands, poor exectutives and a million things. Again, not unique to the game industry, but I'm not usually comfortable attacking a developer unless I somehow had great insight into their practices, like from an investigative article or something like that. Easy enough to just say the product is bad and no one should buy it, if that's what it actually is.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I am pretty sure "lazy devs" is an outdated term to describe the situation, it's a stereotype, and should be replaced with stuff like "unskilled devs", "badly managed devs", "half assed job", "rushed job", "poorly funded" .. etc.

I concur.

I don't call for censorship or anything of that matter, but I would really prefer if developers have the proper credentials to do a certain project before they do it, and not just "wing" it as they go along. I would also prefer for devs to have a considerable training hours/experience on similar projects. Also peer reviews should be a common practice in the gaming sector, maybe establish a body of industry veterans for each platform (PC/Xbox/PS) to analyze the games before their release date to ensure they meet a minimum of quality standards.

Something must be done, because the quality of the gaming industry is going down the drain.

On the consoles, there used to be a QA process to get published. That's out the window now and anything goes thanks to self-publishing. Things are moving in the opposite direction!

But this is a tech thread. The politics of how to improve game release quality needs its own discussion in the Industry forum.

 

[Seanspeed]

So, a bit related, this is a great article going over the graphics pipeline in Cities Skylines 2 and where things are likely going wrong:

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

Full thing is obviously worth reading, but I'll post a portion of their conclusion, cuz I think it's relevant to the recent discussion without really getting off-topic:

"Here’s what I think that happened (a.k.a this is speculation): Colossal Order took a gamble on Unity’s new and shiny tech, and in some ways it paid off massively and in others it caused them a lot of headache. This is not a rare situation in software development and is something I’ve experienced myself as well in my dayjob as a web-leaning developer. They chose DOTS as the architecture to fix the CPU bottlenecks their previous game suffered from and to increase the scale & depth of the simulation, and largely succeeded on that front. CO started the game when DOTS was still experimental, and it probably came as a surprise how much they had to implement themselves even when DOTS was officially considered production ready. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started the game with Entities Graphics but then had to pivot to custom solutions for culling, skeletal animation, texture streaming and so on when they realized Unity’s official solution was not going to cut it. Ultimately the game had to be released too early when these systems were still unpolished, likely due to financial and / or publisher pressure."

So not laziness, nor incompetence. In fact, it's exactly what I kind of blindly speculated myself when the game first came out and its extreme performance issues were brought to light - they were simply busy trying to ensure everything was functional, and little to no actual optimization had even taken place yet. Basically, what a lot of games are like 6-12 months before release.

Seems like there's lots of low hanging fruit to tackle that will improve things quite a bit, and it will definitely be in their best interest to do so since this is gonna be a long-term game, and until they improve performance quite a bit, the amount of people who can actually run this game ok is fairly limited(which also basically excludes the entire console audience).

 

[BitByte]

So, a bit related, this is a great article going over the graphics pipeline in Cities Skylines 2 and where things are likely going wrong:

Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

Full thing is obviously worth reading, but I'll post a portion of their conclusion, cuz I think it's relevant to the recent discussion without really getting off-topic:

"Here’s what I think that happened (a.k.a this is speculation): Colossal Order took a gamble on Unity’s new and shiny tech, and in some ways it paid off massively and in others it caused them a lot of headache. This is not a rare situation in software development and is something I’ve experienced myself as well in my dayjob as a web-leaning developer. They chose DOTS as the architecture to fix the CPU bottlenecks their previous game suffered from and to increase the scale & depth of the simulation, and largely succeeded on that front. CO started the game when DOTS was still experimental, and it probably came as a surprise how much they had to implement themselves even when DOTS was officially considered production ready. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started the game with Entities Graphics but then had to pivot to custom solutions for culling, skeletal animation, texture streaming and so on when they realized Unity’s official solution was not going to cut it. Ultimately the game had to be released too early when these systems were still unpolished, likely due to financial and / or publisher pressure."

So not laziness, nor incompetence. In fact, it's exactly what I kind of blindly speculated myself when the game first came out and its extreme performance issues were brought to light - they were simply busy trying to ensure everything was functional, and little to no actual optimization had even taken place yet. Basically, what a lot of games are like 6-12 months before release.

Seems like there's lots of low hanging fruit to tackle that will improve things quite a bit, and it will definitely be in their best interest to do so since this is gonna be a long-term game, and until they improve performance quite a bit, the amount of people who can actually run this game ok is fairly limited(which also basically excludes the entire console audience).

I don’t think Cities skyline can be used as a standard in this discussion. The developers came out before the game released and told us that they hadn’t met performance targets. If you want to use something more related, I think a few months ago, there was performances profiling of Jedi survivor on pc which showed proper incompetence. GTA online loading on pc comes to mind where the modder t0st fixed the loading. There are lots of examples of pure incompetence.

 

[Seanspeed]

I don’t think Cities skyline can be used as a standard in this discussion. The developers came out before the game released and told us that they hadn’t met performance targets. If you want to use something more related, I think a few months ago, there was performances profiling of Jedi survivor on pc which showed proper incompetence. GTA online loading on pc comes to mind where the modder t0st fixed the loading. There are lots of examples of pure incompetence.

"I dont like examples that dont fit my narrative, we should only talk about cherry picked examples that do".

EDIT: And thing is, if I hadn't posted that article, you'd probably have easily included Cities Skylines 2 as a great example of how lazy and incompetent developers are. Because it absolutely is one of the least optimized major releases in a very long time. The point you should take from the article is that there are usually REASONS for these situations that aren't as simple as saying 'devs are lazy/incompetent'. But we aren't gonna be privy to these reasons in most cases, which makes it very convenient and easy to just make up your own lazy and simplistic explanations.

I mean, you're including Respawn and Rockstar as studios that are 'incompetent' now? Acting like there's no optimization in their games whatsoever? Cuz that was your original claim, that games nowadays get no optimization at all.

As cwjs points out, making these games is immensely challenging. Video games are genuinely some of the most complicated pieces of software out there. There are countless things that can and will go wrong. There's also countless things they need to accomplish, which means prioritization, which means some issues simply dont get addressed in time for launch because they had other things to do that were deemed more important.

I'm not suggesting we give every developer a pass for any and all issues, just saying to show at least some appreciation for what they do instead of just bashing them and calling them lazy or idiots. It's not reasonable whatsoever, and it's just a lousy way to treat the people who genuinely do work hard to make your hobby possible.

 

[cwjs]

I don't get the long crunching hour defense either, us in the medical sector work longer than anyone else, I've seen colleagues work 96 hours a week, I myself have had to work 120 hours a week for extended periods of time to get stuff done in my career.

Something must be done, because the quality of the gaming industry is going down the drain.

I would actually argue the job is fairly easy (for engineers that is — particularly outside of studios that crunch. Roles like art are incredibly labor intensive) but making a game is very hard, in that large portions of the result are high risk all the way through basically regardless of project management. Many of the things posters here decry (not scaling to memory as much, not supporting fallback pipelines, good scaling at 0-60fps but no attempt to scale up towards 240hz, etc) sound a lot like the results of *good* PM decisions to derisk.

Mostly the unique thing about “lazy devs” is nobody(?) is making huge forum threads about how Calling Ahead To Confirm Appointments Has Become A Crutch or whatever for healthcare workers.

As for industry quality — something like 30 great games came out this year, what are you guys smoking?

 

[trinibwoy]

Roles like art are incredibly labor intensive

Being a video game artist is tough. All that hard work crafting beautiful high poly assets only to ship significantly watered down “real-time” versions. Hopefully with the revolution in geometry complexity their talents can be fully seen and appreciated.

 

[see colon]

All that hard work crafting beautiful high poly assets only to ship significantly watered down “real-time” versions.

Is this a comment on Ubisoft trailers vs shipping products?

 

[BitByte]

"I dont like examples that dont fit my narrative, we should only talk about cherry picked examples that do".

As opposed to you picking examples that fit your narrative? Funny how that works…

EDIT: And thing is, if I hadn't posted that article, you'd probably have easily included Cities Skylines 2 as a great example of how lazy and incompetent developers are. Because it absolutely is one of the least optimized major releases in a very long time.

Jumping to conclusions are we? You only need to look at my post history to see that I had defended the cities skyline devs. I appreciated their honesty in letting the public know so that they aren’t swindled out of their money. It’s rare when a studio has integrity.

I mean, you're including Respawn and Rockstar as studios that are 'incompetent' now? Acting like there's no optimization in their games whatsoever? Cuz that was your original claim, that games nowadays get no optimization at all.

What do you think Respawn was immune? In the first Jedi game, they had massive loading stutter and streaming issues. What did they do the next game? They failed to address the core issues of the previous game leading to the release of one of the worst performing and the worst image quality in a console game this gen by far. Rockstar was included to show that even the best are susceptible to complacency eventually leading to poor optimization.