> But what's much harder to measure is the number of sales you missed. Or where the downed planes were hit. You don't have the downed planes, you can't see where they were hit! You just can't have that measurement, you can only infer the data through the survivors.

Not really. There are about 300 million gamers [1] if you exclude Androids and iPhones. How many sales units did GTA V make? 215 million[2]. It's a meteoric hit. They missed a sliver (35%) of their target audience.

You could argue that they missed the mobile market. But the biggest market - Android is a pain to develop for; the minimum spec for GTA V to have parity on phones would exclude a large part of the market (most likely), and the game itself isn't really mobile-friendly.

Ok, but we have a counter example (pun intended). Counter-Strike. Similarly, multiplayer, targets PCs mostly, developed by Valve, similarly excellent and popular to boot. However, it's way faster and way better optimized. So how much it "sold" according to [3]? 70 million. 86 if you consider Half-Life 1 and 2 as its single player campaign.

I'm not sure what the deciding factor for people is, but I can say it's not performance.

> Time is a weird thing. It definitely isn't zero sum.

If you are doing thing X, you can't do another thing Y, unless you are multitasking (if you are a time traveler, beware of paradoxes). But then you are doing two things poorly, and even then, if you do X and Y, adding other tasks becomes next to impossible.

It definitely is. Tim Cain had a video[4] about how they spent man months trying to find a cause for a weird foot sliding bug, that's barely noticeable, which they managed so solve. And at that time Diablo came out and it was a massive success with foot sliding up the wazoo. So, just because it bugs you doesn't mean others will notice.

> "why is there always time to do things twice but never time to do things right?"

Because you're always operating with some false assumption. You can't do it right, because the right isn't fixed and isn't always known, nor is it specified right for whom?

[1]https://www.pocketgamer.biz/92-of-gamers-are-exclusively-usi...

[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20250516021052/https://venturebe...

[3]https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Counter-Strike

[4]https://youtu.be/gKEIE47vN9Y?t=651

▲ godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

  > They missed a sliver (35%) of their target audience.

Next time you're at a party go take a third of the cake and then tell everyone you just took "a sliver". See what happens...

Honestly, there's no point in trying to argue with you. Either you're trolling, you're greatly disconnected from reality, or you think I'm brain dead. No good can come from a conversation with someone that is so incorrigible.

	▲	Ygg2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Next time you're at a party go take a third of the cake and then tell everyone you just took "a sliver". See what happens... Fine, I'll concede it's the wrong word used. But: > Honestly, there's no point in trying to argue with you. Either you're trolling, you're greatly disconnected from reality Wait. I'm disconnected? Selling millions of unit (Half life) is amazing success and tens of millions is stellar success by any measure (Baldur's Gate, Call of Duty, Skyrim). But selling hundreds of millions (Minecraft, GTAV)? That's top 10 most popular game of all time. So according to you, one of the top 5 best-selling game in history is somehow missing a huge part of the market? You can argue a plethora of things, but you can't speculate that GTA V could have done much better by saying "you're trolling"/"no point arguing". And saying that optimizing the DLC JSON loader could have given them a bigger slice of the pie is incredulous at best. You're extrapolating your preferences to 6 billion people. It's like watching a designer assume everyone will notice they used soft kerning, with dark grey font color on a fishbone paper background for their website. And that they cleverly aligned the watermark with the menu elements.