Hello I made a mistake and let my mind wander a bit, so I was thinking gee it's so convenient that some dev's these days have a shit code problem that's so bad it makes you need to buy better hardware. Then my next thought was what if thats the point? We've seen sites like pc gamer recommend parts. What if some studio's are getting kickbacks somehow. my thought process was that incompetence can't be the only reason for games running like they have 5 different copy's of denuvo sucking on them at some point things start looking deliberate like the pokemon company's latest fuck up.
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I mean incompetence seems to be the most likely answer (since you need to CHURN out the game faster, fuck if it runs well or not). If we are talking about gigantic companies tough... It's a self fulfilling prophecy, since they all want to be the "hot new thing", wich coincidentally requires the best possible gear to run. Journos going along with it it's just par for the course by this point "write something positive about this, and use referral links".
Wouldn't surprise me. I know companies pay game creators to really promote a single console.
There's definitely been some evidence that kickbacks have lead to wildly different performance on either side of the Nvidia/Radeon divide before. But that was more likely more of a "here's a bag of cash, make sure you use all the optimisation options that benefit our hardware the most" kickback, not a "just fuck shit up fam" kickback.
General poor performance across the board definitely seems more likely to be due to incompetent/sloppy/rushed work than by design. I'm sure there's a good chunk of junior devs who get sucked into that hell-churn who only really have vaguest conception of the differing computing overheads to different ways of doing things.
I think there is just less of a drive to optimize and trying to build the item around the hardware.
For example, cartridges and CDs used to have very limited space, so they had to be very smart about their coding to make things fit. Such as Super Mario Bros the entire game being smaller than a picture of the game. Same with graphical prowess being so unfettered they don't need to have concerns about their own limits. Our limits mean nothing to them because they simply assume we will upgrade.
Simply, the crunch made it so only the great could succeed in spite of their limits. Now without those limits the market is filled with basic bitches doing basic bitch level work.
You should have seen the computer market of the late 1990s, when a brand-new, multi-thousand dollar computer would be obsolete in 3-6 months. It was insane.
And people have been complaining about shitty, sloppy code at least since Windows '95/Microsoft itself was a thing; I pretty much remember nerdy computer science types flatly accusing MS of hiring bad coders, and being responsible for 90s era code-bloat. Some of this was from people older than myself, who worked with punch cards and ticker tape computers in school.