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Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many!

I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Origin, when Ubisoft forced uPlay on you no matter how you bought the game, and so on. Now, it seems like we're pulling back from that situation somewhat - a lot of EA games are back on Steam, for example.

I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?

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It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI.

Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

To be fair steam has always been a wrapper around a browser for its store content etc. Maybe the outer chrome has been pulled into that though…

In early Steam days, the store and community pages where handled by using mshtml.dll, with most of that ported to Chromium when they launched Linux and Mac OS versions.

I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).

They use CEF(Chromium Embedded Framework)

Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days.

This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts.

I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.

Let's not discount the other possibility: they outsource development to the cheapest bidder.

>Is that really surprising?

>I was actually amazed...

You countered your own argument there.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of new evidence. While you might be aware of the effect, you can still easily underestimate its impact.

Another example of this is Dan Abramov's post from 2018 about things he doesn't know - https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/

As a very well known figure in the React community, the creator of Redux and currently working for Facebook on the React core team, he says people often think he's an expert in everything.

Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required:

A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched.

It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performance, or else they'll be crushed in benchmarks.

My old boss worked on the PC port of Dead Space 3.

He actually did spend significant effort optimising his shaders to get good performance on PC, but an Nvidia driver update would silently replace some of his code with hardware-optimised shaders they'd written themselves (similar to how Windows 95 had a hard-coded fix for Sim City).

This was never advertised publicly, and the only reason he found out was because he debugged the executable and noticed his shaders were never actually being executed.

Can you say more about the hardcoded fix for Sim City? This sounds fascinating.

EDIT: Was rushing, but updated with the exact quote here so people don't need to go digging :)

I believe this is the story OP mentioned [1].

> Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

Yep, that's exactly what I was referencing in GP!

It is absolutely the case that drivers contain code to fix errors or optimize away mistakes made in top tier games. This is well-known and often can be demonstrated by renaming the game binary or making other changes. Sometimes this happens with the blessing of the game company, and sometimes it doesn't.

Or, sometimes GPU folks will send a team over to help the game studios fix performance issues during their development.

There are some studios who push the envelope and make beautifully optimized games. There are many, many more who ineptly cobble together components and make something that runs well-enough.

xx:HeapDumpPath=MojangTricksIntelDriversForPerformance_javaw.exe_minecraft.exe.heapdump

So it might actually be a good business strategy to just focus on building a popular game, and outsource optimization to the graphics card companies for free?

The reason that you see drivers release with specific games mentioned is exactly because of this. And also why the driver installer packages are so large. What I can't say is how much of a difference the GPU manufacturers work makes on average. I would have to assume there's a reasonable bump otherwise it wouldn't be worth it.

You get an absolutely massive performance boost by using newer drivers on Halo Infinite. I don't know exactly why, but it never goes above about 36 fps on low settings on older (AMD, 6800xt) drivers, but hits smooth 80+ at 4k on high with the drivers that mention Halo Infinite in the patch notes.

That’s wild. But if they have cases where gains can be that much then it’s very clear why it’s worth it to fix the the stuff that other companies wrote

Yeah - I assume this particular case must be due to an actual bug in the games engine, rather than just poorly optimized shaders etc. I'm curious to know exactly what causes it though.

Modern CPUs are extremely capable superscalar processors. In order to properly feed them, you must design with SIMD in mind. Even then, you can almost never rely on compiler auto-vectorization, and you must use intrinsics yourself. This is necessary even for such simple things as automatically opening doors when you move near them. In other words, many many things that are never even done on the GPU.

Of course, after release, the biggest improvements come from outside the game dev team. The point is not to forget all the improvements very carefully and skillfully baked in before release, just because consumers don't see the delta.

The people with the skills and desire to work on games are working on games. Even within the games themselves, the front end is often an afterthought.

Wow, my impression was the opposite. Slow and crashing: Just like every game they made. They have a uniquely high input lag and bugs is kind of their thing in general.

There are a couple of highly technical, highly capable game studios. Bethesda isn't one of them.

Most game studios produce poorly optimized junk and are barely managing to ship a working product.

The question I ask is if Bethesda spent all the time on technical things would they make the amazing games they do? Give me a Bethesda game with bugs over any other smooth game with no heart any day.

Every company has an attention budget to spend from.

Sure. There's nothing wrong with a non-technical focus.

Nobody wants them to spend energy on the technical side, we want them to use an existing engine like Unreal.

The incredible moddability of their RPGs, at least, is in large part to the flexibility of their engine. How many other games have active modding communities 12 years after launch as large as New Vegas'?

hasn't bethesda been limping "the creation engine" which is really gamebryo along for the last 10 years? They are doing technical things, they're just doing them poorly.

> There are a couple of highly technical, highly capable game studios.

Which ones are those?

Naughty Dog is (big) one that comes to mind immediately. Check out their GDC talks. GDC in general is a good place to find in depth technical talks from devs.

From the people I've talked to, Epic Games and Riot developers seem to have their shit together as far as being able to scale their backends to millions of players. Improbable too (although they're more of a game services studio), who are the creators of Thanos*

* https://www.improbable.io/blog/thanos-prometheus-at-scale)

> Riot developers

The League of Legends client (which launches the actual game) is awful too. I don’t understand how it continuously burn 20% of CPU when doing nothing.

Epic

Valve

Guerilla Games

(IMO)

Bungie

Rockstar San Diego

id Software is the one that comes to mind. Even with the Zenimax acquisition and Carmack's departure, they don't seem to have lost their engineering chops. Doom 4 and Doom Eternal are known to run incredibly well.

FromSoftware (Dark Souls/Sekiro) Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo) Santa Monica Studio (God of War) Kojima Productions (Death Stranding) Larian Studios (Divinity Original Sin) Playdead (Inside/Limbo)

Studios who choose/have the freedom to release a game "when it's ready", and/or have Sony/Microsoft backing.

One can hope Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda will change their ways, but having set the release date of Starfield (11/11/22) so far ahead of time doesn't inspire confidence... hopefully they'll have the freedom to push this back if needed.

* companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities … to show amazing graphics with complex logic … can't make a simple GUI.

The wage slaves they've got working on the store and launcher front-ends are probably not the same highly talented designers and others that they have working 80 hours trying to panel-beat a game into a shape that they can get out of the door without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.

>without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.

this is bathesda. There won't be many patches, but not because its bug free, but because its broken and will remain that way. The community will patch it, right?

Two words: Fallout 76

It never fails to amuse me when I am playing some sprawling open world tasklist from Ubisoft and something happens that diverts me into the weird world of achievements kept on Uplay. All this highly-optimized 3D work and lovingly-polished 2D menus is suddenly covered up by a collection of React placeholder items doing their "loading data of unknown size" pulse animation at an erratic 3-10fps.

I imagine that it is implemented and maintained entirely by people who are biding their time waiting for an opening on a team where they get to do something they give half a damn about, because it is pretty clear that nobody has put any love into this stuff.

One might say the same about the AWS management console.

GUIs are actually a ton of work. They look simple because it's a collection of simple parts, formatted text, buttons, sliders, text input, etc... but if you go through all the various screens and ubique interactions in something like a game hub/store/user/friends etc it ads up to a huge amount of work. Often more than graphics engines

With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers.

It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..

Intangibles are a major cost factor as well. Not just the servers, but an entire authentication and customer support infrastructure.

Scammers are not an easy cost to estimate or an easy value to sell resistance against.

It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.

That seems backwards to how the actual customer perception worked out though. I very quickly noted that Origin prices were worse than Steam prices, and avoided it. If that was their intent, they forgot the storefront itself has a perceived value.

The issue with Epic is the pure lack of features (user profiles, reviews[^1], community forums) , and no Mac/Linux support.

^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.

I've had to struggle with Epic just to delete a game at times. And the giant tiles in the library are already a pain to navigate through with a library 1/20th the size of my Steam library. I could live without features if the core functionality was nailed in, but it's just not there.

The only people I know using it as a broad Steam replacement are doing so ideologically: they want a competitor to exist so they use it even if it's worse.

The other issue is Epic's buying exclusivity for certain titles on PC - even after they were announced as available on other online stores. These bribes, especially since Epic wasn't involved during development, upset a lot of folks.

it's not (wasn't? I don't know if they still do it) as much as making games exclusives to Epic as making sure they aren't released on Steam; I'm pretty sure Epic's head honcho said something to that effect and a few games which had deals with Epic also released on the Microsoft store

Right, they did that even for some crowd funded games.

And for others it has meant that the Linux version was delayed until after the excusivity deal was over (e.g. Metro Exodus) or removed (Rocket League).

The Epic launcher supports Macs.

There's not much software that supports Macs, but there's increasingly little on Steam too that runs on a modern version of MacOS too because of Apple's decision to abandon the space.

Epic's launcher is one of the worst, constantly consuming resources doing who knows what in the background.

Microsoft owns Bethesda, and has transitioned to primarily offering its games via Steam or via the Xbox app. I imagine that Bethesda is doing this to align with Microsoft; existing library through Steam (with potential to add them to the Xbox app if they join get added to GamePass, maybe), future releases through Steam and Xbox.

Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue.

the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or using the platform to outright threadlock and silence user complaints and criticism. the launcher directly contributed to the wholesale review bombing of virtually every bethesda title on Steam and even showed up in the class action lawsuits filed during the fallout 76...well...fallout.

I think, honestly, that Microsoft is feeling pretty happy with how things are working with steam right now - they've probably only got to do a very minimal amount of work to integrate with the platform while internally they have MS Game accounts that tie everything together for any of the tracking needs they have. I'm sure they'd love to convert all of the MS Games users to their own store but they've managed to extract a whole bunch of unexpected business from AoE2 and other titles and they're probably hoping to minimize any damage to the ecosystem.

> Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue.

What I find interesting is that Microsoft and/or Bethesda chose to migrate users to Steam rather than the Microsoft Store or Gamepass. It would have been an opportunity to get more eyeballs looking at Gamepass subscriptions, but also would have been less popular. Or maybe all the legacy stuff being migrated is a burden they don't want?

More than likely Valve has offered better deals to these larger companies to get them back in-house. It's very probable EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, etc. all have gotten more favorable terms now, by proving they were willing to leave Steam and roll their own launcher.

30% from 0 to 10 million

25% from 10 to 50 million

and 20% from 50 million on.

They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...

>at some point 20% ... start look like not horrible deal

Not, if you are Microsoft.

Pay 20% now, or be forced to spin out Xbox via anti-trust ruling in the future. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

That's 10 million dollars, that pays for a team of 10 people for 4 years.

10 people in 4 years don't sound like a lot to setup and run support, distribution, payment integrations for let's say 100+ countries. Which many having unique payment providers.

source for these numbers?

> I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?

I think Steam has a big first mover advantage, like a user's default browser or text editor, always on or starting up, while the others were an extra step that users only did when they had to. The recurring sales and frequently updated offerings of games and updates on Steam's home page is also a plus; Origin was static, Epic is minimalistic, Steam is more of a proper website with a load of different angles - sales, recommended games, new / early access games, updates, and jazzy graphics if they have a big sale on. The other launchers are purely functional.

Epic Game Store was the nail in their coffin. They all wanted to have their own Steam and rake in all the revenue directly but didn't want to invest the time and effort to build a platform like Steam. Valve virtually stopped making games to focus only on Steam. I feel like watching EGS hit the market, the difficult road it is to build a true Steam competitor for them, and how long before it will actually be profitable was a reality check for everyone else. Like using AWS over Bare Metal, somethings are worth paying someone else to do for you.

What's funny is the original CS:GO gui was built using flash.

For anyone interested, they used Scaleform which is a middleware a lot of games would use to have flash-based UI. It's technically a discontinued product but even Hitman 3 last year used it.

As crappy as Flash is for security, it was such a good tool for interactive animations.

Here's a list of games that used Scaleform, though it often isn't used as the only UI system. Sometimes it's just main menus or world-space UI elements. Found in a quick Google so I can't guarantee it's totally accurate, but I know many on here are correct.

https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform

When I was doing work for Nickelodeon around the iPad 1 days, we just could not get around the fact that flash was an amazing tool for animation and anything else we used would have tradeoffs. Tech-wise, a poor product. As a tool for design-minded people? Unmatched.

Flash "for animations" still exists. It was rebranded Adobe Animate (presumably just to avoid the negative branding).

It's still used heavily for vector animations to my knowledge.

I didn't know this - thanks!

It's mainly the economics of "If you don't ship on steam, you miss out on the steam market" imo

Yeah I for one am glad that these launchers are going by the wayside, especially the onerous DRM-"enforcing" launchers.

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