Gaming

"Then" is just indie today.

Games back then : created by 1 to 4 people with autism because they wanted to have fun on a computer

Games now : driven by dickheads that just left business school at the whims of billionaire conglomoration funds.

To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they're bad practices when you're not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.

Problems with game developers might better be understood as problems with capitalism, to paraphrase Ted Chiang

So we're just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?

"WHY ARE YOU PIRATING OUR GAMES???"

You realize it's not devs that make those decisions, right? It's publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.

I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.

Not just games . I download one of the trendy note pad apps. It’s 500mb.

Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren't a thing so you were just screwed.

I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.

What a horrible take. Game devs were so bad at one point in the past they almost killed the entire market. Classic survivorship bias here.

For those that are unaware, the second chad is most likely referring to .kkrieger. Not a full game, but a demo (from a demoscene) whose purpose was to make a fully playable game with a max size of 96kb. Even going very slow, you won't need more than 5 minutes to finish it.

The startup is very CPU heavy and takes a while, even on modern systems, because it generates all the geometry, textures, lighting and whatnot from stored procedures.

Fuck the haters. 80s game devs were creating beauty out of nothing.

I see stuff like this and I don't blame developers/coders for all the shit that's happening. If you objectively look at gameplay and such, most games are actually pretty decent on their own. The graphics are usually really nice and the story is adequate, if not quite good, the controls are sensible and responsive...

A lot of the major complaints about modern games isn't necessarily what the devs are making, it's more about what the garbage company demands is done as part of the whole thing. Online only single player is entirely about control, keeping you from pirating the game (or at least trying to) plus supplying on you and serving you ads and such... Bad releases are because stuff gets pushed out the door before it's ready because the company needs more numbers for their profit reports, so things that haven't been given enough time and need more work get pushed onto paying customers. Day one patches are normal because between the time they seed the game to distributors like valve and Microsoft and stuff, and the time the game unlocks for launch day, stuff is still being actively worked on and fixed.

The large game studios have turned the whole thing into a meat grinder to just pump money out of their customers as much as possible and as often as possible, and they've basically ruined a lot of the simple expectations for game releases, like having a game that works and that performs adequately and doesn't crash or need huge extras (like updates) to work on day 1....

Developers themselves aren't the problem. Studios are the problem and they keep consolidating into a horrible mass of consumer hostile policies.

"The inverse square root function in the C math library isn't fast enough. That's okay, I'll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster."

...Is the breast milk thing inspired by reality? Wait, I don't know if I really want to know.

I never thought game patches would become such a terrible thing. But the state some games have released in has been crazy.

DAE games bad now??

it's not devs fault, is the company

those always online "single-player" games aren't what you think.

your ads and tracking friends are always interested in playing with you.

I hate this conflation of "Developer" with every other role in modern game development.

If you think the new Porsche looks shit, do you blame the Mecanical engineer who designed the brake mechanism?

If your new manga body pillow gives you a rash, do you blame the graphic designer of the manga?

There is not a single thing listed in the meme above that is actually the fault of the actual developers working on the game. Don't even need to talk about the first picture.

game size is studio management related. They want to stuff as much (repetitive, boring) content into the game as possible. Plus a multiplayer mode no one asked for.

Optimizations don't happen because the CEO decides to take the sales money of the game this quarter, and not next, and ships an unfinished product.

Always online is ALWAYS a management decision.

It's a shit joke, it's wrong because it blames the wrong people, and its also just dumb.

This is so true. Also let's not forget where game is almost unplayable and constantly crashing on release.

Play Xonotic. I get 200 fps on Intel HD Graphics 2000.

Besides being a maintenance fucking nightmare, wouldn't writing a game in assembly make it a lot harder to be cross platform? I really don't get that panel.

games made with agile teams and with passions are probably good, regardless of when they were made. i'm young but growing up i only had access to really old computers and saw that most of the stuff that was made back in the day was just garbage shovelware. it was hard not to get buried in them.

most triple A developers today are far more skilled in both writing and optimizing the code however when the management is forcing you to work long hours you're gonna make more mistakes and with tight deadlines, if you're doing testing and bug fixing after developing the entire game then it's going to be the first thing that's getting cut.

that being said i wish they really did something about the massive size games take on disk. my screen is 1080p, my hardware can barely handle your game on low in 1080p so everything is gonna get downscaled regardless and despite how hard you wanna ignore it data caps are still here, why am i forced to get all assets and textures in 4k 8k? make it optional goddamit.