#It's corporate greed all the way down and it's ruining every facet of my favorite medium

[sleepdeprivedbard]

I was gonna leave it in the tags but this touches on a special interest and a particular Hill I Will Continue To Die On so I want it said (particularly for peeps that are less Aware): With the advent of more and more powerful gaming hardware that you don't ultimately need to use nearly as much of the hardware's power to get a stunning and gigantic AAA experience, and the rise of one-size-fits-all game engines like Unity and Unreal giving ultimately less control over the backend of your game to cut the costs of developing your own proprietary engine, AAA gaming corporations have gotten EXTREMELY comfortable cutting costs because you don't NEED to optimize every pixel of your game :) Not to mention ALL OF THE POINTS in the tags listed above because the tags above are SO GODDAMN right. And that's not getting me started on the culture that's formed around constantly pushing games that are BIGGER, FLASHIER, and MORE BEAUTIFUL with MORE CONTENT than the last which exasterbates the issue to the nth degree because that creates more space for things to fall between the cracks. And the Hill I Will Continue To Die On is that this attitude is what causes most ports and even first party nintendo games to run like ass on the switch and why you'll still hear people roast the switch for being dogshit hardware. Because yeah, like everyone above me is saying, weaker hardware just does not get any love. And especially in the case of ports, they never optimized the game properly for their home hardware in the first place and now they have to put it on something running a mobile processor??? And not to say nintendo doesn't put work into optimizing for their own console (they certainly do the best at it for the most part) but they still release games that frequently have optimization issues. My mind falls back to the remaster of Miitopia which would have framerate drops during certain scenes, and that was originally a 3DS game. They easily could have not had that problem. And you know what if you read all of this and you think we're all just being whiney and should REALLY just shill for the biggest beefiest tech and stop being poor, or if you wanna see examples of why this jams a stick this far up my ass please please I implore you to watch GameHut's videos on youtube where he talks about his work and career as a software engineer, or if you want to be pointed more directly at a video, how about a video detailing how he had created a system similar to and arguably more efficient than No Man's Sky's signature seamless loading as early as the PS2, or perhaps the making of Micro Mages, an NES title by Morphcat Games from 2019 where they discuss all of the (super clever!) techniques they had to use to get the game to do what they wanted and still have it run natively on the actual hardware, or how about an interview about the development of Crash Bandicoot for Playstation 1 where they talk about how they literally programmed the game to hack the console to get it to run the way they wanted it to. It's LITERALLY not an exaggeration to say these people used to (and in some cases still do!) bend the laws of physics, and these are only a handful of examples. I promise you, a large swath of AAA titles being released today could very extremely likely run on your phone if they were allowed the time and resources to make the port. Yes, even that one.

we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better