Indie developers, like the 1-5 staff game studios on Steam, never stopped doing so. You can run most indie games on an old PC today. The big AAA game companies like Activision are taking a big gamble on the next generation, which they insist you’ll need a newer console or PC to run. Bethesda tried that with Starfield and it didn’t work out so well. The game’s not as terrible as people say, but its kind of in the middle of the pack of AAA gaming RPGs and it demanded a fairly large amount of VRAM to run well. I predict things will not go well for games like Modern Warfare 4 that won’t run on the last gen consoles or PCs.
If developers aren’t aiming at older devices then they’re making a niche product not a mass market product
You would think this would encourage better optimized software, but I doubt devs will actually do that. Most modern code practices are about ensuring that code is more easily maintained, often at the cost of performance. Breaking “clean code” rules can easily make programs run 10-25x faster, but will be much harder to maintain.
We also seeing a lot of vibe coding now, which mixes clean code practices (which are well documents online) with messier, less well planned code.
That’s grossly over simplifying the problem. “Clean code” is also not a formally defined concept, which could include anything and everything.
I’ve had more performance problems due to hacky workarounds, themselves necessary because of lack of foresight during development, rather than a slow abstraction (in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the latter)
Am I crazy or is this one of the very tiny kinda shitty silver lining to all of this? Software developers are being forced to optimize their shit?
Indie developers, like the 1-5 staff game studios on Steam, never stopped doing so. You can run most indie games on an old PC today. The big AAA game companies like Activision are taking a big gamble on the next generation, which they insist you’ll need a newer console or PC to run. Bethesda tried that with Starfield and it didn’t work out so well. The game’s not as terrible as people say, but its kind of in the middle of the pack of AAA gaming RPGs and it demanded a fairly large amount of VRAM to run well. I predict things will not go well for games like Modern Warfare 4 that won’t run on the last gen consoles or PCs. If developers aren’t aiming at older devices then they’re making a niche product not a mass market product
They’re not actually gonna optimize anything
You would think this would encourage better optimized software, but I doubt devs will actually do that. Most modern code practices are about ensuring that code is more easily maintained, often at the cost of performance. Breaking “clean code” rules can easily make programs run 10-25x faster, but will be much harder to maintain.
We also seeing a lot of vibe coding now, which mixes clean code practices (which are well documents online) with messier, less well planned code.
That’s grossly over simplifying the problem. “Clean code” is also not a formally defined concept, which could include anything and everything.
I’ve had more performance problems due to hacky workarounds, themselves necessary because of lack of foresight during development, rather than a slow abstraction (in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the latter)
They wont though. They will press on as usual, and hope Nvidias (and others) dreams of cloudbased subscription computers somehow becomes reality.
What’s forcing them? Do we have alternatives?