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“Then” is just indie today.
That and it easily running on Linux, either naively or though Proton, is why I haven’t touched any AAA in like… at least 5 years? Maybe closer to 10.
Problems with game developers might better be understood as problems with capitalism, to paraphrase Ted Chiang
We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.
And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people
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.
I miss when games used to be good. Anyone 'member Vampire Survivors, Lethal Company, Bug Fables? Developers these days just can’t compare.
now that’s survivor bias
EDIT : here’s the fun thing, Lethal company would have been a mod back in the day
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.
Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren’t a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn’t run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn’t realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn’t have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers “then” made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn’t have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
CDs could do 500 Mb
It was actually 700 MB
Oh, no. It was not.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you’d mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you’d need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB
I think I came along around 2 years after burners were commercially available, so I never saw that. And the 700 MB discs came along very shortly later. So I never had a concept of a 550 MB CD (btw you said 500 MB). This is the first I’ve heard of it.
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.
I love watching videos about old game systems programming. The gymnastics you had to do to code, like, super Mario, just to show more than 3 colors is really interesting.
People who think modern coding practices are bloated should study why certain speed running mechanics work. A lot of them stem from things we would never do today. We’ve removed entire classes of bugs by using “bloated” languages and tools.
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.
So we’re just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?
Yes. Because older is always better. Then when the present is the before times people will look back fondly on it too.
Not just games . I download one of the trendy note pad apps. It’s 500mb.
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.
Yes, yes it would. They meant to say that it would improve performance (if done well, which it was). That improved performance would allow it to run on a wide variety of devices, including those with low specs.
Also at the time writing for x86 only would have been plenty portable. Even today that would cover “standard” PC architecture. (Although nowadays you probably want to put it on mobile devices, gaming consoles or macOS, so not ideal.)
Yeah, it being about performance makes sense. Still don’t know how that dude managed to write a full-ass game in assembly though. Takes a special brain to even be able to think that way.
I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.
Yeah exactly. Apparently they meant “most machines” as in “most machines that could run windows”. Like in a performance sense. Weird way to put it imo, since “most machines” to me would refer to platform concerns.
