About AAA gaming in 2023

[Thunderstorm__]

I only returned to updating gaming news after not touching anything related to it for a while and I was really surprised with what is currently happening inside the industry.

It seems that broken launches are very prevalent this year; the past years had some games like this, but not to this extent I think. I also got to know how badly Nvidia is being scolded by PC gamers atm because of their outrageous pricing, which is also interesting. But the most surprising thing for me is probably this forum because you guys seem to love the console and support exclusivity while every other forum has this "living happily together" mindset that I just can not relate to. You guys also pointed out the nearing end of Xbox as a console brand which I don't think other places seem to notice. I don't think MS abandoning the console market is set in stone yet but what you guys pointed out makes it very likely.

What I primarily want to discuss is why many AAA games this year are like this. Do you guys think the responsibility is solely on the developers or a combination of reasons causing this catastrophe?

 

[Systemshock2023]

Devs love to slack and as soon as you provide them with more power they will use it, some of it will go to improve the game and the rest to make their life easier. Stuff like DLSS is used as a crutch.

This is a thing on consoles as well. Look at that Jedi game dropping to 720p on the PS5. The PS5 should not be rendering anything at 720p unless we are talking about the most advanced game on the planet at the very end of it's lifecycle.

Just don't buy games at release.

 

[Bryank75]

A range of issues, some economic and some technical...

Consoles are usually the priority, as developers only have to make one version of the game with a limited set of options,optimization is much easier AND if the game has a marketing or exclusivity agreement they may be getting technical or financial support to help the game be as good as it can be from the console manufacturer..... PC doesn't have that option since there is no one company responsible for PC gaming.

More copies are sold at launch on console in 99% of cases and the difference is usually quite large, the prices are higher generally, giving the publisher a larger return per copy sold.

Rampant piracy on PC

PC is an old architecture, built around multi-tasking and is not ideal for gaming. It's more modular and less integrated than a console. Shader compiling, less performance per dollar spend and bottle necks are more pronounced on PC due to this.

Direct X and windows are a hindrance.

Every company that makes parts for a PC HAS to make a profit and it pays to withhold the best performance for more and more money... we see this with Nvidia. They withhold the sameexact GPU with just a small bit of extra memory onboard for hundreds and hundreds more than the standard version.

Loads of reasons.... more than I can write atm.

 

[Thunderstorm__]

Devs love to slack and as soon as you provide them with more power they will use it, some of it will go to improve the game and the rest to make their life easier. Stuff like DLSS is used as a crutch.

This is a thing on consoles as well. Look at that Jedi game dropping to 720p on the PS5. The PS5 should not be rendering anything at 720p unless we are talking about the most advanced game on the planet at the very end of it's lifecycle.

Just don't buy games at release.

About the Jedi game, I think we can look at it from another perspective. When I gamed in the past, I never had this thought. But currently, I feel like the need to develop and optimize for 3 different platforms really shrinks a game's quality and performance across the board. In the last generation, unoptimized games tend to be a mess only on Pc, but now, even games on consoles are less stable than ever. This is clearly not a good sign and I feel it's not gonna be just a temporary thing. It also does not help that development costs just keep rising

 

[Nhomnhom]

It's mostly a PC issue and it's relatively new in this scale (but has existed for sometime without people bringing too much attention to it). I really don't understand how shader stutter can't be eliminated and I blame Microsoft for it, everybody should move to Vulkan and trust that more competent companies will take care of it.

One of the reason I like to play on Linux is that in my experience stutter has been eliminated while on Windows it's a constant.

 

[Killer_Sakoman]

It's mostly a PC issue and it's relatively new in this scale (but has existed for sometime without people bringing too much attention to it). I really don't understand how shader stutter can't be eliminated and I blame Microsoft for it, everybody should move to Vulkan and trust that more competent companies will take care of it.

One of the reason I like to play on Linux is that in my experience stutter has been eliminated while on Windows it's a constant.

Funny when Linux version is a 2nd class PC port and still perfoms better than Windows

 

[Nhomnhom]

Funny when Linux version is a 2nd class PC port and still perfoms better than Windows

Linux isn't even running a native version for it, goes to show how bad Windows is (would also probably explain in part why Xbox under performs it's specs compared to PS5).

 

[KiryuRealty]

About the Jedi game, I think we can look at it from another perspective. When I gamed in the past, I never had this thought. But currently, I feel like the need to develop and optimize for 3 different platforms really shrinks a game's quality and performance across the board. In the last generation, unoptimized games tend to be a mess only on Pc, but now, even games on consoles are less stable than ever. This is clearly not a good sign and I feel it's not gonna be just a temporary thing. It also does not help that development costs just keep rising

A lot of the performance issues this generation are on PC and XBox, which shows that Direct X 12 is a really shitty API and MS was not honest about its real-world performance.

Nothing is going to fix the issues for PC and Xbox performance until DirectX gets fixed, and good luck with that!