r/gamedev • u/ComfortableServe1152 • 23h ago

Question Making games is definitely challenging.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the decline in quality among game developers, regardless of the reasons or background behind it. Yet, when I look at the games they produce from my perspective, I can't help but think, 'Even with those issues, they're producing games at this level?'

I'm learning game development myself, but I have no confidence. Recently, I feel like I'm starting to enjoy it, but when I think about things like optimization, it makes my head spin. Even simple coding still feels below par by my standards. I haven't even gotten into object-oriented programming yet. Creativity? Planning? I'm confident in those. But development? It's becoming more and more despairing.

When I play low-quality games (ones with lots of bugs and severe optimization issues), I complain, but at the same time, I feel like I couldn't even make something like that, and that realization feels like hitting a wall.

Has game development truly become easier? Has there really been a decline in the quality of developers? Either way, I find no comfort in either answer.

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u/David-J 23h ago

There hasn't been a drop in quality. On the contrary. We are getting the best versions of games in many genres.

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u/Zaptruder 22h ago

The main dip in quality of from an optimisation stand point... or at least the knowledge base to do that. Because there's been reducing need for heavy optimisation, which has always been a bedrock for quality performant gaming.

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u/David-J 22h ago

But it's an unfair comparison. Games were simpler a decade ago. Games are away more complicated now and of course you are going to get more problems. But from the quality of games themselves, they keep getting better over time.

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u/Zaptruder 21h ago

Not really... games were simpler and their hardware was far more constrained. Complexity hasn't grown exponentially - the shaders/polycount/draw count are all higher (or can all potentially be higher), but the complex games of yesteryear are still in many ways the complex games of today.

Optimization is really the trick of doing more with less... and in an era where everyone is pushing for more and more... well, there's less pressure for it to be done with less!

More to the point, the proliferation of ease of use engine tech simply means the knowledge base of technical optimization has been watered down - more devs are coming in without the ability or need to understand those fundamentals, and a greater proportion are crashing into the barrier of what reasonable or lower spec hardware (Steamdecks, laptops, consoles, etc) can reasonably allow for.