[Saka]

In Febuary dozens of disappointed fans complained about notorious stuttering in Hogwarts Legacy. Soon after it turned out the game was consuming humongous amounts of RAM, and if the system did not have enough (circa 25GB was the cut-off) the performance in the game would suffer even with otherwise good hardware. It's unfortunate, as many fans of the franchise are not necessarily hardware geeks and premade builds or laptops are still not sold with 32GB as standard, at least not DDR4.

Then there was Kerbal Space Program 2 requiring a computer from NASA to actually play the game. Though, it doesn't come as a big shock, as its predecessor was known for notoriously bad performance.



@DoctorEldritch posted a while ago wondering what was up with The Last of Us Part 1. The game got flooded by negative reviews, rightfully so, for its atrocious performance. It was hailed the worst port ever by the media.



In the upcoming releases there's the Gollum game that I was interested in. It only took me a glance at the minimum and recommended specs. Now I don't want to play it anymore. I would have to play it at 720p to get anything better than a slideshow, unless the developers would actually improve the performance. Credit to our Legion lavaswimmer for the picture.



And now there's an uproar on Reddit about Jedi: Survivor and its inability to run decently on a RTX 4090 card. If it can't play smoothly on the highest end gaming GPU available, then what of the people who don't even have that? Likely even a NASA computer wouldn't run this game well, but maybe a computer from 2 years in the future.



I thought, it could be interesting to discuss this topic; why it happens and what people in the community think about it. Are the issues with these games relevant to them?

[DracoTarot]

@Saka Something that doesn't make sense to me about all this is how developers decide in the first place the product is now ready for release into the market.

Do developers assume everyone has supercomputers and if you don't just go out and buy one. As you've mentioned not even NASA computers would run some of the releases at full potential.

It's almost like these companies have an attitude of "we know there's going to be issues but we will only pay attention if gamers complain about them and if gamers don't have high-end systems, it's none of our concern".

[Saka]

@DracoTarot Unfortunately, in a lot of companies upper management tends to be out of touch. It's not the developers deciding about the release dates and with unrealistic deadlines the developers are forced to push an unfinished product that is yet to get an optimisation pass.

Current generation of consoles is very close in hardware to the desktop computers, which created an illusion of easy conversation to the other platform. It's more complicated than that, alas, and disregarding architecture differences leads to abysmal performance. For example latest PS and XBox have super fast storage allowing near instant loading of textures, which mainstream computers do not yet offer. A lazy solution is to keep everything in runtime, but that often consumes more memory than people actually have in their devices.

The management is hoping to use the strength of franchise/IP to rake in cash from pre-orders. Even if the launch is a complete disappointment, only a fraction of consumers will actually refund the game. A lot of people are not aware of their refund rights or don't want to bother other than just complaining and hoping for future patches.

If people were actually mass-refunding and refusing to buy the games until the performance was improved maybe that would send a clear enough message to the companies. As it is right now, only a minority does so, and the rest just buys the game and complains.

[DracoTarot]

@Saka It makes complete sense not to blame the developers the whole time and a bit inconsiderate of me. I know the last say would always be from top management. Then I would rather say management needs to listen more to their employees instead of pushing unrealistic deadlines and perfecting a product before release. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen in this day and age.

It's sad how some companies would prefer quantity over quality and don't really care about bad reputation because the profits are showing.

I still feel even if the current generation of consoles is very close in hardware to the desktop computers they know from experience things are much more complicated but still keep on releasing titles and look the other way then everything can be fixed with a patch or two afterwards. I don't feel it's fair to gamers.