This is not a reason for accepting it imo

Optimization takes up time, and often it takes up the time of an expert.

Given that, people need to accept higher costs, longer development times, or reduced scope if they want better optimized games.

But what is worse, is just trying to optimize software is not the same as successfully optimizing it. So time and money spent on optimization might yield no results because there might not be anymore efficiency to be gained, the person doing the work lacks the technical skill, the gains are part of a tradeoff that cannot be justified, or the person doing the work can't make a change (i.e., a 3rd party library is the problem).

The lack of technical skill is a big one, IMO. I'm personally terrible at optimizing code, but I'm pretty good at building functional software in a short amount of time. We have a person on our team who is really good at it and sometimes he'll come in after me to optimize work that I've done. But he'll spend several multiples of the time I took making it work and hammering out edge cases. Sometimes the savings is worth it.

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kappaking 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Given that, people need to accept higher costs, longer development times, or reduced scope if they want better optimized games.

God why can’t it just be longer development time. I’m sick of the premature fetuses of games.

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Cyphusx 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The trade off they're talking about is to arrive at the same end product.

The reason games are typically released as "fetuses" is because it reduces the financial risk. Much like any product, you want to get it to market as soon as is sensible in order to see if it's worth continuing to spend time and money on it.

	▲	mort96 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		And this really shouldn't surprise professionals in an industry where everything's always about development velocity and releasing Minimum Viable Products as quickly into the market as possible.

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maccard 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> God why can’t it just be longer development time.

Where do you stop? What do the 5 tech designers do while the 2 engine programmers optimise every last byte of network traffic?

> I’m sick of the premature fetuses of games.

Come on, keep this sort of crap off here. Games being janky isn't new - look at old console games and they're basically duct taped together. Go back to Half-life 1 in 1998 - the Xen world is complete and utter trash. Go back farther and you have stuff that's literally unplayable [0], or things that were so bad they literally destroyed an entire industry [1], or rendered the game uncompleteable [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde_(video... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/30/a-golden-shinin... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/hv63ad/comm...

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colechristensen 2 days ago | parent [-]

Super Mario 64, widely recognized as one of the most iconic influential games ever... was released with a build that didn't have the compiler optimizations turned on. They proved this by decompiling it and with the exact right compiler and tools recompiling it with the non-optimized arguments. Recompiling with the optimizations turned on resulted in no problems and significant performance boosts.

One of the highest rated games ever released without devs turning on the "make it faster" button which would have required approximately zero effort and had zero downsides.

This kind of stuff happens because the end result A vs. B doesn't make that much of a difference.

And it's very hard to have a culture of quality that doesn't get overrun by zealots who will bankrupt you while they squeeze the last 0.001% of performance out of your product before releasing. It is very had to have a culture of quality that does the important things and doesn't do the unimportant ones.

The people who obsess with quality go bankrupt and the people who obsess with releasing make money. So that's what we get.

A very fine ability for evaluating quality mixed with pragmatic choice for what and when to spend time on it is rare.

	▲	maccard a day ago \| parent [-]
		> The people who obsess with quality go bankrupt and the people who obsess with releasing make money. So that's what we get. I think this is a little harsh and I’d rephrase the second half to “the people Who obsess with releasing make games”.

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unusualmonkey 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Just wait until after launch. You get a refined experience and often much lower prices.