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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the bugs - the game is still quite hollow (cough, Starfield). A game like this should of ocourse have a continous perf process and if it doesn't run ok (min 30fps on median hardware 60 on enthusiast hardware for example) then it just shouldn't ship. I wish more studios would stop having crunchtime for meaningless deadlines such as holiday seasons. Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now".

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> then it just shouldn't ship

Part of the problem is that AAA is just (IMO) too big and expensive. Devs might actually have to ship a broken game around holiday time just to get enough sales to survive.

And the other extreme can be dangerous too, like how Mass Effect Andromeda's development dragged on forever, and EA let it happen because its such a golden IP.

I think the ultimate solution is to just scale down most studios a little bit, so the studio and publisher can afford to delay. Medium sized studios are the sweetspot, especially going forward with GenAI.

If a studio downsizes, they might be able to survive making lower budget games. And while it's true that if every studio does this, the industry would get better, there's incentive for _one_ studio to pump up their funding and make a super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare.

This makes it a 'race to the bottom' style (or a race to the top?) competition, where higher funding gets you more marketshare, but only against lower funded studios. It's akin to advertising budgets. Mostly a zero sum game in the end.

> super-high-fidelity game, and grab all marketshare

This is not necessarily true any more. I think smaller studios chipping away for a long time are making better games than most big ones.

Hopefully this dynamic creates a cascading market crash to wipe out all the biggest players and force the industry back to its proper size.

It's not like this is unique to AAA. Unless gamedev is your hobby and not full-time job you simply have no choice other than ship game and try to fix it.

Any small indie studio have to deal with it.

EA were the culprit for those delays by forcing bioware to use frostbite. Blame rests solidly with some synergies savings suitsuperman.

Going by the allegations in the reports, it wasn't just frostbite. Bioware chose to dump a lot of time into features like procedural generation (and having to use Frostbite exhasterbated this problem even more).

They defacto threw out a working pipeline for a beloved product for no other reason then cost savings and project expenses justification. It was a disaster that basically destroyed bioware.

The procedural stuff was just a " while we leap of the cliff with no plan" let's make the cost cutters happy who wail because there "abandon working system" for completely different system that's working for a completely different usecase did not work out. Honestly for decisions this clueless and value endangering a whole executive floor should have been let go.

Nobody is forcing anyone to sell unfinished product as if it were finished product at finished product prices.

>Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now".

Well, yes, because it doesn't matter. It is on the top seller list on Steam. I agree with you, but we can discuss fixes till our fingers bleed. In the end, the problem is capitalism.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?supportedlang=english...

I've learnt that (initial) success of a sequel is 95% because of its prequel. True performance may be seen if it has another sequel, or DLC, or heck, another 3 months.

That's the benefit about continual updating games. By the time CS3 is ready people won't remember CS2 2023 but whatever 3-6 years of updates does to CS2. For a modern example: who's still complaining about Cyberpunk in 2023?

It's not like Sonic 2006 that is forever broken, sold decently at launch and then cratered the series for the next decade to come.

> For a modern example: who's still complaining about Cyberpunk in 2023?

Those who bought it and played it in 1.0! Many of them never saw the fixed game. They weren’t helped at all by the fact that the game was quite good 6 months later. Worst case they’ll never buy a CDPR game again, best case they’ll buy the games after 6 months (which by the logic of rushing releases is disaster because apparently not selling millions the first holiday season is a failure).

There's still a risk of the game cratering completely like Imperator, although it's not a sequel to an established title. Sometimes I'm still worried how Victoria 3 's fate would be.

That’s still not a sufficient condition for success. Longer term the studio brand will be hurt, not least.

> In the end, the problem is capitalism.

Is this sarcasm? I’m asking seriously. If not, then how is a poorly running game the result of capitalism, and what is the alternative economic model that would produce only high-performance / efficient games?

I don't think it's sarcastic. The game runs poorly because it needed more time for optimizations. It doesn't get more time for optimiztions because the publisher said it needed to ship now. The publisher can say that it needs to ship because they can advertise for good launch sales, because the a large portion of the customer base will buy it at launch as long as there aren't obvious showstoppers.

It's a bit trite to sum that down to "capitalism", but sure. it's the underlying societal buzzword issue

Corner cutting doesn't happen in socialist countries?

In a truly socialist structure, corner cutting comes from prioritizing other duties to the people, directly or indirectly. Capitalistic pressures come from money.

But there is no pure capitalistic structure nor socialist one. I did already mention it was a trite comparison.

>In a truly socialist structure, corner cutting comes from prioritizing other duties to the people, directly or indirectly. Capitalistic pressures come from money.

You can argue that's the same under capitalism, just replace "the people" with "customers". In both cases corner cutting is only an issue if there's deception involved, wether that's a Party member using lower quality materials for a construction project, or a video game company spending less time polishing a game. I don't see a problem with releasing unfinished/poorly optimized games as long as it's clearly disclosed. Early releases are basically this.

> In the end, the problem is capitalism.

surely, it is the underlying economic system ruining the art of modern video game development!

The problem is European capitalism, as the game developer here is Finnish and publisher is Swedish. Important clarification since you seem very invested in calling out the US in every other post of yours, so I'm sure you appreciate the calling out of systemic European failures here.

The Soviet Union produced some of the best video games!!

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