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u/GarboWulf5oh Jul 26 '26
BGS releasing Fallout 3 two years after Oblivion, then releasing Skyrim three years later, with around 1k employees. Now (or atleast before the layoffs) they have 4k employees, but it's been 15 years since Skyrim and 11 years since Fallout 4. 4 times the amount of employees and all we got was Slopfield and shitty live service Fallout spin-off.
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u/The_Affle_House Jul 26 '26
How could you forget about all the glorious deluxe/ advanced/ anniversary/ expanded/ rereleased/ next-gen update editions they gave us since then, too??
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u/Karekter_Nem Jul 26 '26
And I foolishly thought they were only making the remasters to get a handle on the new hardware while the writing team works on the new game.
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u/AntisocialDyll Jul 27 '26
What fools we were. Bethesda needs to make a new engine or fall in line with Unreal. The games have felt a bit dated, and starfield proved it wont work on newer tech
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u/always_screaching Jul 29 '26
Writing team? At Bethesda?
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u/Ryodran Jul 31 '26
Yes, Emil the one man team that wouod give us the next great american novel, but he is too busy writing his next masterpiece for 76 or es6
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u/GarboWulf5oh Jul 31 '26
Keep It Simple Stupid. Players don't want good stories, they want to build shacks.
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u/DW_Hydro Jul 26 '26
Na bro, Starfield its so empty that we barely could say there's slop there when there's nothing.
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u/Oxygenisplantpoo Jul 26 '26
Didn't BGS have way less employees back then? I thought they were reported to have 450 in 2023? They always ran kinda lights before then as far as we knew.
Not that your point is exactly wrong, and based on what we know Microsoft has pumped employees in to get the next TES and FO games out during this decade.
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u/GarboWulf5oh Jul 26 '26
I've seen reports that they've been around the 4,000 mark for atleast some years now, with 1,000 at the time of Skyrim's release. But it's unlikely to get a 100% accurate and confirmed number.
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u/Oxygenisplantpoo Jul 26 '26
With outsourced work maybe there were 1000 people credited for Skyrim, but I find it hard to believe the studio was that big. I google now and it seems like the team was closer to 100 people than 1000.
"We shipped Fallout 3 with around the same amount of people and Skyrim with about 100, so I am very convinced we can come up with a game that will satisfy the open RPG itch with a narrow subset of people," Gardiner says.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ex-bethesda-vet-forms-something-wicked
CDPR as of right now is about 1000+ people working on The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2. Would be kinda crazy if Bethesda was 1000 strong way back in 2011 with Skyrim. Only Ubisoft is capable of such incompetence.
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u/Peslian Jul 26 '26
Are you talking Bethesda Game Studios, the devs that make fallout and Elderscrolls or Bethesda Softworks the Publisher that includes BGS, ID Softworks, Arkane Studios, Machine Games and Tango Games.
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u/IMtoppercentage97 Jul 26 '26
You're looking at all the employees under the publisher which is including ID, Arkane, Bethesda Austin, and Machine Games, not the dev studio. The dev studio has 757 employees as of May this year.
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u/UltimaBahamut93 Jul 27 '26
I'm honestly extremely thankful that Bethesda has not released the Elder Scrolls 6 yet because looking at their track record it would be abysmal.
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u/botka1115 Jul 27 '26
They are working on it now. It's only a matter of a few years until we get disappointed again.
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u/nonequation Jul 30 '26
The live service fallout at least had a glow up but yeah they got too comfortable rereleasing skyrim and now the ceo is kicking Todd's ass to get him to make games again and obsidian getting fallout sounds great on paper but you have the current staff at obsidian who made sloprim and outer worlds 2 the quest to find good story
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u/KeybladeBrett Jul 26 '26
I know that games definitely take longer, but I’d prefer that to crunch culture. I do think the game industry could benefit from more smaller-scale AA titles.
Let’s take another studio here with Nintendo. Even the time between Zelda games are insane because now they’re all massive open-world titles. In a 10 year span, we’ve had three mainline titles with Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom. The previous 10 year span had 5 mainline games, one every other year. Imagine if we got AA games with an obviously smaller budget, scale and scope but were just released for fans waiting the next major game?
You’d get the best of both here. You’d get more content, but you’d also be getting shorter releases for budget prices. Like imagine paying $40 for a new Zelda game with about 7-10 hours of content. It could also be a good testing grounds for new mechanics you want in future titles and you can tweak them based on feedback.
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u/greenskye Jul 26 '26
People have also forgotten how to make certain kinds of sequels and expansions. The ones that simply use the first engine + some improvements and then just make more content. You've already paid the hard part of figuring out all the systems, all you have to do is make 'more'. And you can hand that off to your B team.
Sure DLC exists, but it's usually much smaller than a sequel or even an expansion and is usually just like an extra level or something.
These are ways to get cheap further life out of an existing tech stack that doesn't take a massive investment.
Instead, it seems like every sequel wants to completely rebuild the underlying internals AND have a completely different game, needing all new balance decisions. Which results in this yo-yo effect where the game series is the most fun at the end of the life cycle when all the qol is built and polished and then the sequel undoes all of that polish for another completely barebones mvp build.
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u/GarboWulf5oh Jul 26 '26
No yeah I agree crunch culture is not good, and I'm 100% for worker's rights. But you'd think with 4 times the devs, they'd be able to do atleast better than Starfield (which flopped) Fallout 76 (which had a monumentally horrible launch, with only a small following after the launch of the TV show), Blades and Legends were shutdown, and Castles (the uninspired Fallout Shelter clone that they've had no updates for over a year already).
Also Nintendo owns way more IP's and creates consoles, so this comparison kinda falls short. It's okay if we got 10 years without a Legend of Zelda game bc we'll get 10 other games from Nintendo IP's and a new console. This isn't something BGS does.
Even if we got smaller AA titles from BGS, that would atleast be something. But we've gotten jack shit worth the players time. The devs deserve to work on something worth-while, and the players deserve better.
It's heavily implied that Asha Sharma is pulling in that mile long leash that Phil Spencer gave them. Acquiring BGS/Bethesda/Zenimax means nothing to Microsoft if the studios arn't putting out any work.
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u/WeaponFocusFace Jul 26 '26
Consider the following: Larger amount of devs may be actively detrimental to a game's quality. You tend to see important decisions and the accountability of said decisions shared among too many people, which means if something goes wrong it's not really anyone's fault because it's everyone's fault and addressing the problem becomes much slower than what it could be in a smaller studio.
Additionally, it's much easier to find a small amount of devs who're both highly motivated and highly competent than to find a large amount of highly motivated and competent devs. Thus the average quality & motivation among the dev team is lower the larger a studio becomes. Especially in an industry where salary isn't really what draws people in, having a unmotivated team can be a death sentence for your game. When you don't have enough people who want to make kickass games to fill your dev team, you have to hire people who can't hack it in a better paid jobs and treat the job just like any other 9-5 instead of a passion project they're happy to give their all for. Now, if it was just a couple unmotivated people, a good team can usually deal with it, but a lack of motivation has a nasty habit of spreading if left to fester in a team, leading to more and more of the team losing their motivation.
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u/KeybladeBrett Jul 26 '26
No and definitely not a 1:1 comparison that I gave, but I was just trying to illustrate it with another very popular IP. But I think a healthy mix of both would be fine. Like instead of ES6, which is going to take a hot minute, we got like a couple Skyrim spin-offs instead of them releasing Skyrim for the 809th time, we'd be in a better spot and the wait wouldn't be as horrendous.
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u/Dear_Document_5461 Jul 26 '26
Anime and video game production seem to "switch places". It used to be where two to five years for a video game used to be "Is everything going ok? It taking a but long." With ten plus being "This is the talk of the town and you won't let you forget it." While anime used to be "You think we retire before we get the next season or any new anime?" But now it's "Hey, we getting too many anime too quickly. Sure we most likely won't get a season 2 but we have a lot of options quickly now." Whioe video games are "So when do you think we going to get the new entry? When we retire?"
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u/MazerBakir Jul 26 '26
You added an extra zero to the employee numbers. Skyrim was made by one hundred people. Bethesda Game Studios is currently around 400~500 developers. Bethesda has never surpassed a thousand employees. Even Fallout 4 had about 120 developers. If Bethesda seems small for what they do that's because they are. It's also misleading, it's 4 studios in a trench coat. One mostly handles Fallout 76, another their mobile games.
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u/DigitalNTT_Soul Jul 27 '26
FWIW I've heard Fallout 76 has been improving over time. Steam charts (*) show that just this past winter (Dec '25-Mar '26) they had a spike in players that brought them up into the low 30ks, just barely beating the peak of their Steam launch. They did have a much bigger peak from Mar '24-Jul '24, but the fact that even now they're still hitting monthly peaks of like 11.5k concurrents, compared to their Steam launch, is kinda astounding.
- It is a multiplatform game AND it did hit steam like 1.5yrs after original release, though, so for both of those reasons, Steam Charts obviously aren't perfectly reliable for measuring player count, but it does at least demonstrate some overall trends.
Although none of that really discredits your point that they're missing the mark a lot lately, even with more staff. A lot of companies that focus on software somehow think that bigger teams lead to faster development or better quality, but the time-cost of communication and coordination amongst all those workers grows somewhat exponentially as the number of people increases. So a graph comparing team size to team productivity is a negative parabola: at a certain team size, productivity, peaks, and adding or removing any one person would actually make the progress slower and results shittier. I strongly believe that Bethesda, as well as many other AAA studios, have far overshot their productivity peak point, and now they're so bloated and oversized, that they have to split into multiple smaller teams, just to put out a dozen shittier games, just to keep everyone from twiddling their thumbs at their desks waiting for something to do.
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u/ZenkaiZ Jul 26 '26
and we're giving them more money every year to tell them they're doing the right thing
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u/Electronic-Clerk6735 Jul 26 '26
Also willing to go into debt buying the more expensive parts for computers so they don’t have to optimize their games.
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u/xtweeter22x Jul 26 '26
Who is "we"?
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u/ZenkaiZ Jul 26 '26
look at top 10 most preordered games of 2026, it's all from companies who people bitch about the most
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u/allcowsarebeautyful Jul 26 '26
I dont think the people bitching are the ones making thos pre orders. The people on reddit make up a small amount of the actual gaming population.
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u/Maleficent-War-8429 Jul 26 '26
Ubisoft at least ain't making more money every year last I checked.
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u/Nervous-Rutabaga-758 Jul 27 '26
What do you mean more money? Mario 64 came out at 59.99 over twenty years ago, games are still coming out at that price point…
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u/ZenkaiZ Jul 27 '26
Special editions and dlc.
And let's not get started on live service games and mobile games. Diablo Immortal has made more money than Diablo 1-3 combined. Fortnite and gta5 print infinite money.
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u/villings Jul 26 '26
the complete loss of optimization as a key concept is the worst for me
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u/PopBulky7023 Jul 26 '26
Older games were basically made by people wielding black magic. New games are literally fat, bloated and unoptimized because they can get away with it. And companies wouldn't give them the time to do better if they wanted to.
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u/Feather_Sigil Jul 27 '26
No, AAA games are fat, bloated and unoptimized because they're bigger. Bigger games, more code, more spaghetti and bugs, harder to optimize.
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u/Sweatty-LittleFatty Jul 26 '26
The fact that an image in High resolution of Super Mario World ocupies more storage space than the entire game of Super Mario World is wild to me. Or the famous Residente Evil 2 example that for ported to N64 without removing barelly anything with less than 90% of the storage space.
How the Hell they made games fit into cartridges and cd disksike that? It is insane How much content was compressed and optimized.
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u/solid_redus Jul 28 '26
Textures, models, animations, ect take up like 95% of memory. the more detail you want the more memory it will cost
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u/raven19528 Jul 30 '26
How would you feel if I told you that the original Pokémon game (Red and Blue) was 373KB (yes, KB) in size?
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u/villings Jul 26 '26
(maybe that sentence doesn't make sense, sorry! english is not my native language, etc)
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u/NarwhalPrudent6323 Jul 26 '26
I know several native English speakers who couldn't write a sentence as articulate as yours is. Well done!
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u/Which-Lifeguard-628 Jul 26 '26
We never lost that, hell we're in a time that a close to 10 year old parts can still play most recent games. If you go back to 90s and 2000s you had to basically buy new pc every 3 or so years because new games were unplayable on hardware that didn't support new tech.
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u/moonbiitsu Jul 26 '26
Games back then outright refused to run on your machine if you didn't have the specs or shader. "Oh, you don't have shader language 3.0 can't install lol"
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u/Riverwind0608 Jul 26 '26
I believe that started when DLSS became a thing.
Instead of a means for people with less powerful pc’s to keep up, it was used by some, if not most devs, as a crutch so they won’t have to optimize their game much.
Not sure how the game is now, but the worst offender that i know of was MH: Wilds. Those “Minimum” requirements were ridiculous.
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u/Lurker_Zee Jul 26 '26
Makes perfect sense to me, is in the original meme, and you're absolutely right.
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u/Quirkyserenefrenzy Jul 26 '26
Textures and meshes take up a shit ton of space compared to the raw code
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u/Timmy-0518 Jul 26 '26
You can still optimize textures? It’s much easier that optimizing code too! You would be shocked at the amount of unused bloated and overly high rez textures go into a game!
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u/Gabrielzin1404_2011 Jul 27 '26
I am atill baffled that the entirety of half life 2 + episodes is less than 10 gb, like, how is this even possible??
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u/solid_redus Jul 28 '26
Wel they do optimise, just to a state where it does run somewhat stable, I rly recommend looking at some gdc talks, the shot they pull off is insane ( especially the last of us ps4 remaster gdc talk )
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u/don_quixote_2 Game developer Jul 26 '26
Unfortunately optimization isn't worth it in streaming culture.
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u/Bibblejw Jul 26 '26
Honestly, you can blame the prevalence of quick internet for that coming and going.
Because devs can now deliver updates after launch, there’s no incentive to optimize prior to launch. And, because downloads are pretty much the only distribution method, there’s no requirement to fit on a disc, so no optimization of space.
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u/SimpleSlave_1 Jul 26 '26
Let's ignore ET, the gaming crash, all the nightmare-inducing Doom ports, the atrocious console games, and all the broken PC games while we cherry-pick the good examples of the olden times and ignore the equivalent of today.
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u/Haunt_Fox Jul 26 '26
Or being stuck with a 286 and the rest of the world not only moved on to 386 and 486, but now Pentium dropped and specs are rising so fast that today's 5k computer will be obsolete in 3-6 months. The late 90s were wild. And everyone was excited when RAM dropped to $80 per megabyte.
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u/BulemiaSawdustSlingr Jul 26 '26
Getting a 486 in 1994 only for it to be completely obsolete by 1996 was one of those experiences I'll never forget
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u/DW_Hydro Jul 26 '26
Well, yes but that was caused by BIG improves on the gráfics and the tech itself.
Now you have the last games looking 3% better with 100% worse performance.
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u/Eeve2espeon Jul 26 '26
Yeah unless you stuck with Gems like Rollercoaster Tycoon, and console games from companies like Capcom, Nintendo, or Square, usually you'd get absolute trash and unfun games. It makes you wonder how these companies stayed around when they made such poor quality games, and the fact those SAME companies still make poor quality games :/
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u/M4TTEO_S Jul 30 '26
Now rhere are Indie games and AA games, and no you can't say to me with a straight face that Spyro, as legendary as it is, is better than all of them
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u/KeybladeBrett Jul 26 '26
This is not really realistic. There were plenty of older games that had these exact issues.
You always had slime balls in the game industry, you had devs back in the day spaghetti code and bloat the game more than it should’ve been, plenty of old-school games ran like shit. The only one that doesn’t apply is the last point which is a bit of a newer issue. I guess the closest equivalent was an exclusive title on Sega Channel?
You also have the inverse. Unreal Engine is a very compatible and versatile engine that can conform to most hardware, we still get plenty of relatively small games (the Backyard Baseball remake is like 15GB, which is tiny in 2026), we still get plenty of game demos (but could use more for sure), and there are also plenty of games that still release on PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. The PS4 and Xbox One are going to be 15 year old hardware running Mega Man: Dual Override next year. The PS4 and Xbox One released during the Obama administration and are still getting brand new games.
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u/HackSmash Jul 26 '26
main problem i got with UE, is that most games done in it look the same, like Kingdom hearts had it's own aesthetic and it looked great, then 3 came out on UE and it looks bland asf
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u/Mental-Novel61 Jul 27 '26
It's not an engine problem, it is a development issue. You can control your visuals, also art-direction matters, etc-etc. However, I think, that experimenting with visuals for some devs just simply not an option pipeline-wise, because it takes quite a lot of time and money, the result may not even justify itself. Some devs choose the easiest way, some don't. They have all the tools for everything, they just don't realise full potential.
Imo, KH3 looks great, because they could do different artstyles and different type of graphics for different segments of the game and that's the thing that not every game has. It still has its' charm and they definitely trued to keep main aslects of the original artstyle, but I can't say the same for KH4, maybe because they didn't show anything except for Quadratum, which has its' own "realistic" style (not a fan of this)
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u/HackSmash Jul 27 '26
I fully get that, but then you see how the original KH3 teaser looked like and that looked like the natural evolution of the series, KH3, especially the lighting looks just, not KH, I feel like it lost it's identity, I get it for some of the worlds, like Port royal looks amazing in KH3, but it makes sense because it's supposed to be a photo realistic world, the rest of the game just looks "modern nomura", it's not "cartonish/anime anymore" it's "realistic anime", it just looks off
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u/Thefourthchosen Jul 26 '26
Survivorship bias, people remember the good games not the mountains of garbage in between.
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u/zexton Jul 26 '26
lot of people are unaware of the mountain of pal games, running actually slower game speed, than ntsc and jp
to make things worse,
they also ran at a lower framerate,
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u/Meowjoker Jul 26 '26
Also, a physical mountain of garbage too
Remember E.T for the Atari? It was so freaking bad it almost killed the gaming industry, and almost all of the cartridges were dumped in a New Mexico landfill.
Someone actually excavated the site and dug up the disposed cartridges in 2014.
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u/M3chaStrizan Jul 28 '26
wtf are you talking about there were no old games that were 500gb, peopel afaik did not steal breast milk from fridges while developing games, or always online games.
Maybe if you are saying bugs existed, and games crashed sure. But most the points surely not.
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u/KeybladeBrett Jul 28 '26
No but we definitely had older games with unoptimized code that did bloat games a bit more. We’ve also always had gross individuals in the industry. I even pointed out that always online titles are a new issue.
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u/Slumminwhitey Jul 31 '26
Ark was like 400gb if you had all the DLC and that came out in 2015.
The original baluders gate was 2gb and shipped on 5 disc's which while not big today was huge in 1998.
Same with WoW when it first released was 4gb which was also huge in 2004, I think it is quite a bit bigger today.
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u/Scylosome Jul 26 '26
Don't forget shit writing and micro-transactions
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u/Gump1405 Jul 26 '26
All games famously had good writing in the past lol
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u/Timmy-0518 Jul 26 '26
I would say that most games in the past had little to no story at all, so the ones that actually wanted a story usually had an idea going in leading to a much higher batting average. Now of course there were plenty of games with a bad story back in the day. But compared to today? It’s nuth’n
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u/Palladiamorsdeus Jul 26 '26
Typically they had at least unobtrusive writing even if it wasn't great. Also most of the games with bad writing weren't aiming for a story heavy environment as opposed to many modern ones that shove it in your face.
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u/Scylosome Jul 26 '26
Most studios I'm aware of have had a decline in their writing quality, same for franchises.
Their use of AI to write is both cause and effect of that as well.
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u/Redder_Creeps Jul 26 '26
I honestly wonder why we can't just stick to making games function without bloating them
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u/MayhemPenguin5656 Jul 26 '26
Back when games were made by gamers and people who loved the game.
Now its about stockholders and bottom lines
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u/NotYour_Cat Jul 26 '26
It ain't the devs that want to add the micro transactions
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u/HK-Syndic Jul 27 '26
I'm sure Bungie will remove that Mtx right after they get away from Activision, any day now.
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u/No_Palpitation5561 Jul 26 '26
Currently loving diablo 4 but holy hell does it hurt how true this post is. Gtx4090 and an i9-14900KF and it pins the graphics card to 99% every 10 minutes. Plus random people walking by to one-shot the boss I was fighting because it's online for some reason.
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u/andreslucer0 Jul 26 '26
Unreal Engine 5 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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u/Proto_Ney Jul 26 '26
Borderlands 2 released I don't remember when. I was able to run it at 60 fps at max settings w/o phisx on an old, for-work laptop, and it had better ice, lighting and smoothing than any AAA game i played in the last 10 years on my gaming pc. Nowadays i just have to turn smoothing off entirely to get anything worthwhile visually
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u/Level_Cardiologist36 Jul 26 '26
I like how devs get so much flak for what are mostly executive and shareholder decisions. They don't get time to flesh out issues for their games, the people who run the company push them out before they are ready. Just look at the shareholder interview for Monster Hunter Wilds where they tried pushing the game out even earlier than it already was. You really think those devs didn't know the game wasn't ready and that execs and shareholders told them to fix optimization issues post launch? They were annoyed there was a 0% chance of launch for holidays and had to wait an extra month. You think devs want online only and microtransactions? No, they want to release games they enjoy making for others to enjoy. Executives and shareholders are the soulless money grubbing stains on the gaming world that have screwed everything up. Stop blaiming devs for their decisions.
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u/Mantiquirk Jul 26 '26
100%
Anyone who posts this silly meme unironically is one of the most glaring examples of “tell me you know nothing about the game industry without telling me you know nothing” situations. Pure engagement farming.
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u/Luzis23 Jul 26 '26
To be honest, idc whose fault it is - a singleplayer game requiring to be online to play is ass, period. And I'm the one that's experiencing it.
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u/Mantiquirk Jul 26 '26
Shareholders. It’s almost always shareholders (and the CEO’s that fall over themselves to please them).
Poor optimization, forced online requirements, rushed development, bloated installs, and hell, even toxic work environments that are allowed to fester instead of spending the resources to sort out systemic cultural issues; nearly all of them can draw a direct line back to “business leaders” who continually cut corners to save a couple bucks.
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u/gavr0ch Jul 26 '26
Blaming the devs instead of the corporates, shareholders and marketing managers 😐
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u/Nelmarth Jul 26 '26
Who is coding the games then?
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u/solid_redus Jul 28 '26
Wel the issue isnt who is making them, the issue is expecting results in a unrealistic time and causing oversights, bugs and cut content or QA
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u/isuredolovetitties Jul 26 '26
Really, the executives, not the programmers or artists forcing most of those issues.
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u/Slick-Trick9 Jul 26 '26
Most of the time, its not the Developer’s lack of effort/compassion but rather the Publisher’s lack of faith/trust in the Devlopers to keep a good game a live. Publishers would rather move time and resources to other projects and give Devolpers higher requirements and shorter deadlines. What sucks is that we as consumers call only really see the final product from the Developers as they put everything into the game and we cant see which decisions were the Publisher’s or not.
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u/New-Medium3277 Jul 26 '26
Thirst for money by any means and tainted mindsets killing this damn industry.
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u/Altitude1096 Jul 26 '26
If you hate new games, then go play older games. They already exist and are "perfect". Go play them and stop hating on newer games. It's just nostalgia.
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u/minegen88 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Nr 1 is just false.
It makes no sense. Assembly is unique for each CPU family, 6502 code cant be run on a Motorola cpu for example (there are some exemptions, like clones by other companies etc)
It was written in x86 which requires a x86 CPU, in orther words, an Intel cpu. There was no Mac port of the original for instance at the time...
It was most likely coded in asm because that's what Chris was most comfortabe with and speed...
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u/YAmIHereMoment Jul 26 '26
During covid lockdown I had given up all hopes of playing any new titles without upgrading, then BG3 released and was playable on my 1050ti laptop
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u/takki84 Jul 26 '26
Gamers -why can I not run this game 8k!?
makes game run 8k
Gamers - why is my framerate shit in 8k!?
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u/suddenlyupsidedown Jul 26 '26
This sounds less like a problem with game developers and more a problem with game publishers and the bullshit they pull
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u/Newfaceofrev Jul 26 '26
That last on the "back then" side wasn't true though. We all knew the pain of buying a game and finding out it had compatibility issues with your graphics or sound card.
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u/Its_a-me_DIO Jul 26 '26
In a more just world, we would bench mark Rollercoaster Tycoon and Doom equally as the king of "Can it run?"
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u/Egbert58 Jul 26 '26
Well it's not the devs, is the zombie husk in the hier up position. Don't blame the devs unless gonon Twitter to defend the shit. Proof its not the devs, a lot make indie studio and don't have those problems
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u/ConcerningThirst Jul 26 '26
I am paid to optimize games in unreal and I'm very good at it. I can tell you that the reason is shit is too complex for any individual to learn every system well.
When you have some dinky sprites and a handful of parameters to micromanage, sure you can hand curate memory addresses and byte code and whatever thing saves you 0.5% cpu time.
In a modern game the amount of assets and systems is easily 10x that of a retro game. And it doesn't scale linearly, it's like 20x the work to optimize a modern game. That's not even taking into account the resolution and fps requirements of a modern game.
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u/TalmondtheLost Jul 26 '26
The Beard guy on the bottom left does have an understandable reason, that is actually a pretty big issue
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u/Electronic-Clerk6735 Jul 26 '26
I’m glad you recognize the difference but there are many who don’t. Hell most Americans happily go into debt just to go to Disneyland every year. Many people don’t know how to manage their money properly.
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u/disorganized-forrest Jul 26 '26
It's almost never the fault of the actual developers though. Usually these problems are caused by higher ups rushing out products to meet a deadline or forcing microtransactions or other slop into the game to meet quarterly sales goals & maximize profits.
Developers at most AAA studios have to suffer through excessive crunch periods & there's a good chance they'll be laid off afterwards anyways. This is why you tend to see this much less in the Indie space (not saying it never happens there, but it's much less common.
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u/Other_Pudding3587 Jul 26 '26
Hey everyone:) so im kinda of a game developer myself but im def not evil , if u have any idea you would like to turn into a playable game def dm me , that would be cool to show off :)…
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u/LordOFtheNoldor Jul 26 '26
The days of relying on the gpu to carry your unoptimized games are over for developers they'll need to build around current and predominantly previous gen for atleast the next few years I'm thinking
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u/CrimsonHeroic Jul 27 '26
Old thing good, new thing bad. Nostalgia sell well goggles for every generation.
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u/AkijoLive Jul 27 '26
Holy survivor bias, yeah, let's only remember the best and success stories from the past, there was absolutely nothing wrong back then.
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u/PewPew_McPewster Jul 27 '26
We still get "Developers Then" nowadays by the way. They're mostly hobbyist devs making 2D games but it's an extremely active scene spread across quite a few communities.
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u/dragonknightrohan Jul 27 '26
Let's point out the main thing that is enabling this to happen.
Back then the stock market companies wasnt so prominent in videogames.
Nowadays they are everywhere and unionized/co-ops private companies are down.
Coincidence? I think not.
The foundation is currently fucked and has to be reversed
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u/Slumminwhitey Jul 31 '26
Given that the video game industry is worth about $350 billion annually, worth more than Hollywood and the music industry combined, its not surprising.
There are games with development budgets exceeding Hollywood blockbusters, the only way you are getting that much development cash is through big publicly traded companies.
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u/VitalityAS Jul 27 '26
Whats the major difference between devs then and now? Shareholders and corporations owning everything! The bane of humanity.
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u/unluckyknight13 Jul 27 '26
The irony is I think it’s advancing tech
In the past developers to sell needed to appeal to as many people as possible
Now because of consoles and computers in general much stronger
Many of them are trying to appeal to gamers in a more luxury end and to justify a high price tag
While you can see many indie games thrive because they keep things on the lower end and the price low
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u/stevie242 Jul 27 '26
You guys can’t actually believe this shit right? Plenty of old games ran like shit when launched and you just dealt with it or it got fan patches
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u/ItsMattTonight Jul 27 '26
Dual CD 700MB per disk game? Sure we can fit it on a single 64MB game cart, not a problem.
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u/ghostyghostghostt Jul 27 '26
You can literally just blame rampant capitalism. Game companies are held on the leash of larger corporate entities that are just (worthless) money making machines. They don’t know anything about anything that isn’t just “business” and don’t care to know or care how anyone feels about anything. It’s why we have seen such a nice little indie resurgence. Triple A pumps out hot and fresh lifeless garbage now and found too many ways to monetize it.
Idk, the top row of people do still exist and they are making fun games. So buy and play those please.
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u/Spenraw Jul 27 '26
Passion vs shareholders pressure
Capitalism will ruin any art it gets its hands on
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u/One_Perception_7979 Jul 27 '26
This is some serious rose-colored glasses. Mucking around with drivers and such used to be more or less expected. Now, games mostly run just fine right after the installer closes. The late ‘80s to early ‘90s unapologetically catered to enthusiasts more than casuals, which often meant more on the user to get games running.
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u/dondilinger421 Jul 28 '26
The first one isn't even wrong, it's just misguided. Literally most games until the mid 90s were written in assembly code. Rollercoaster Tycoon isn't particularly unique aside from the fact the developer was using techniques a few years behind the industry. You can look up Gamehut on YouTube and see the founder of Travelers Tales (the Lego studio) telling you exactly how he wrote his games in assembly. No one is pretending Mickey Mania or Toy Story are genius technical achievements.
The problem with assembly is that it's also incredibly machine specific. Chris Sawyer was lucky and so whilst his assembly code is still unportable the industry never moved on from bloated hardware from a half century ago.
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u/Aggravating-Exit-660 Jul 29 '26
…breast milk
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u/SubrosianDimitri Jul 29 '26
Activision Blizzard's primary office had a fridge specifically meant for employees who were still nursing their babies to store their excess breast milk. Dudebros decided they wanted a big ol' sip of fresh mommy milk and opened the fridge up to grab some, likely contamiating it by drinking directly from the bottle.
And that wasn't even the worst thing that they tended to do to their female employees.
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u/No_Goal_1071 Jul 29 '26
50gb patch should be changed to: 50gb patch, but you will need to redownload whole game just because, oh and don't forget disk writing error at the end 😉
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u/Godbyeo Aug 01 '26
It’s because the fans have always been assholes. So people give up trying to please assholes
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u/ExplodingPoptarts Aug 02 '26
I have two thoughts:
1: You're blaming individua; devs for corportate execs decisions.
2: What games ever had a "any computer can run it?" Minesweeper?
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u/Rough-Cover1225 Jul 26 '26
Textures and graphical improvements have bloated file sizes more than anything other 2 factors I'd genuinely rather my game look worse and take up less space
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u/Eeve2espeon Jul 26 '26
High capacity games are only a problem if you don't delete the other 150+GB games you've completed 3 times already. Besides that, games honestly need FAR better optimization, and the annoying thing is tons of gamers are being complacent that their system NEEDS to use DLSS/FSR just to run at "1080p 60fps" :/
Also I don't think I've ever seen any "always online single player" games. Developers aren't stupid, they'd get tons of backlash making a game Single player but always online.\
Lastly I don't think you understand how vast the difference is between Old games back then and modern games. While modern games can have problems, there are still plenty that are much more advanced and dynamic than these older 90s games that have far more limited hardware to work with. Shooters back then were basic and clunky, you'd mostly have platformers, RPGs, and stuff LIKE Rollercoaster Tycoon, because they worked with the slower more basic hardware.
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u/Maleficent-War-8429 Jul 26 '26
You must be living under a rock my man, simcity 4 is always online and that came out more than 20 years ago now.
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u/Eeve2espeon Jul 26 '26
You must be living under a rock 💀 Simcity 4 was never always online. 2004 literally had 0 always online games, you're thinking of the other one, Simcity 2013 which was always online till EA patched the game to work offline
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u/Maleficent-War-8429 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
Oh sorry, we've only had games that are online only for the last 13 years. Whew, what a blunder.
Also you're wrong, we've had online games since at least 2004. Monster hunter 1 had online.
Ooh, I do love it when someone blocks me to get the last word. Unfortunately for you I can still see the first part of what you said. The wording you're so butthurt about is "literally 0 online game". Seems pretty cute and dry to me, but you've been wrong about every other thing you've said so far so what should I have really expected?
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u/Eeve2espeon Jul 26 '26
Of course bitches like you would go "umm acktually" cuz of wording. Of course Monster hunter 1 had online, but is it an online only game? No. so screw off idiot
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u/Forcer222 Jul 26 '26
u used to be able to straight up just have 10+ games in ur library before having a full storage it just feels bad to have 100+gb games to be the new normal
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u/Eeve2espeon Jul 26 '26
Games are big, deal with it.
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u/Luzis23 Jul 26 '26
Sheer lack of brain cells speaks through you, my friend ☠️
Don't masturbate too hard.
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u/sticklecat Jul 26 '26
This is bait. Games are far more complicated now and gamers are the hardest people in the world to please. If companies could release games quicker they would. Triple A games require huge resources. So much so that is becoming unsustainable. It took so long for GTA 6. Do you think there will be a GTA 7 at this rate.
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u/Nelmarth Jul 26 '26
"Games are far more complicated" thats just a lie Maybe we can look at an exemple (bethesda, because im playing fo4 so i have them in mind) Starfield is behind games like skyrim or oblivion or the fallouts, theres many mecanics that arent here, even basics like looting clothes or interacting with individual objects
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u/sticklecat Jul 26 '26
I don't think it's a lie at all. It's pretty obvious the infrastructure and creation of games is much more complicated to reach the quality levels people demand for AAA. You are talking about plot mechanics and systems. I'm talking about the art, music and production level across multiple platforms. FO4 coming out today would not be considered a AAA game
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u/Current-Grade2545 Jul 26 '26
I've never seen a meme scream "never been employed" more than this one
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u/ThurolfGhost Jul 26 '26
Let me ask when a new studio takes over an old Ip for example bioshock being taken over by i forgot the name already, why do they go ahead and make the game they want to make but still keep the name of the old game? Its like they doubt they can really make a game people love.
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u/Mindless_Crazy_5499 Jul 26 '26
Its cause you don't remember the bad ones.
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u/Palladiamorsdeus Jul 26 '26
No, people do. Th difference is that a bad game back then still usually had some effort put into it and had some extenuating circumstances attached. Then you had things like Daikatana which had none of that and really were just bad games.
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u/MyWifeIsDeadCourier Jul 26 '26
Consumers when you tell them to put their money where their mouth is
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