I wish my clients would understand that, and my code is a lot simpler than a video game.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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I built an API connector for work (I'm a hobbyist, not a pro) to download what is the most common cargo transported by trucking companies from the DoT database. Everyone complained because they had to enter the company names correctly into a CSV as it wouldn't accept typos or do fuzzy matching, nor could it automatically determine which was the head office of a company, only return a list of all of the offices.
if it takes you 6 months to add a new fundamental game mechanic then thats understandable
if it takes you 6 months to remove an unnecessary popup then youre incompetent. (looking at you, Hunt Showdown)
Lol hunt takes six months dev time to make the ui twice as worse
For Palworld, a new island takes 6 months, per the article. Probably talking about Sakurajima and the big southern one. That makes sense, since it's not just putting stuff there and calling it a day on the first finished thing, some level design has to happen so the place makes sense and doesn't feel super boring to explore.
Half a year's work takes 6 months? I had no idea
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
This still cracks me up even though I heard it so many years ago
Two minutes silence for every minute
It would also be great if devs added things during development that should simply be there at launch. Instead of that, shit gets rushed out the door with promises of future fixes and updates. And then devs get all huffy when people rightfully ask for things to be added that are supposed to be basic launch features…
supposed to be basic launch features
isn't this very subjective and dependent on the game and scale of success?
What I don't understand is why do developers make bad games? They should just make good games instead.
Gamers want good games, not bad games.
The developers aren't in charge of what's in the game, the PMs and accountants are
To be fair, the Prime Ministers should really be focused on more important things than a game companies software development.
Yess. I boggles me that the narrative is still "devs this, devs that". It doesn't take becoming a game dev to understand that actual software developers are not calling shots on plot twists, monetisation model and so forth. Like, what the hell is wrong with people babbling about devs?
Soo true
Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap. God knows why.
Just look at the trending / best selling lists on Steam. There’s shit on there that I wouldn’t play if you paid me. Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.
Honestly, Steam should look into setting a minimum quality level for things sold on the platform.
Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap.
As much as everyone love Oblivion...it all started from there with the $9 horse armour DLC.
God knows why.
Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.
Kids. Fucking kids. Thankfully I am never that stupid to buy individual DLCs even when I was a child, which is compounded by familial circumstances and education, but kids will be kids. Either they stole their parent's credit card to pay for useless virtual items, or they were spoiled and never taught with financial literacy.
horse armor that didnt even add armor to horses (edit. Functional armor, before someone ACKSHUALLY's me :p)
It just, iirc, 3x'd the horses base health.
I am still salty about that shit to this day, because its what lead us to the miseryscape of nickle and dimed bullshit we have today.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't know Helldivers 2 -- what basic launch features were/are missing?
There's a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.
Ah yeah that's a tricky one. I guess as developers we'd all like to be ambitious and plan for millions of users but that sort of hardware and architecture takes time and money that might not be realistically in the budget/scope.
I've also not really got insight as to who would have a say on that kind of hardware, whether that's PMs or devs. Probably higher-ups, right?
I think for something like this, you'd rent cloud servers as you'd expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it's actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.
That's nothing new.
Gamers who don't know any programming, or maybe made a little utility for themselves. Looovee to bring out the old "just change one line of code", "just add this model", etc. to alter something in a game.
They literally do not understand how complex systems become, specially in online multiplayer games. Riot had issues with their spaghetti code, and people were crawling over eachother to explain how "easy" it would be to just change an ability. Without realizing that it could impact and potentially break half a dozen other abilities.
Diablo4 has memory leak issues. As a software engineer myself, I just don't see any excuse for a game this long in production to have memory leak problems.
There is no doubt that a lot of games are getting rushed without being properly tested.
Even if you're an actual software dev, it's still pretty much impossible to guess how much work something is without knowing the codebase intimately.
When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...
When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:
- The codebase is fucked
- All resources are going to new features
- Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
- Your current dev team is sub par
Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.
Can’t be done is usually shorthand for the cost massively outweighs the benefits. No different from remodeling a building. Like coding, literally anything is theoretically possible but sometimes you’d have to redo so much existing work it’s never going to be worth it.
And even then it’s sometimes impossible because how much can you keep in your head at once. Everybody specializes on these large projects. I may have 30000 ft view of how things operate but getting down into specifics can be hard. I have some intimate knowledge of the learning management system we develop for, which is way less complex than most games, and there are always little gotchas when you make code or architecture changes.
Absolutely, it's impossible to know how much. But it's a lot easier to grasp that it's rarely just "changing a few lines" when it comes to these types of situations.
Specially since many programmers have encountered clients, managers, etc. who think it's that simple as well.
My favorite one is "Just add multiplayer".
Sure. I'll just go right ahead and toggle it in the engine. Why didn't I think of that?
You did it twice, so I'll be the grammar police:
Especially = particularly
Specially = for a specific purpose
as a professional software dev, games with fozens or hundreds of abilities that interact with eachother scare me
Yea, in things like MOBA games you have to compensate for so many edge cases that the amount of interactions between abilities is as you say, scary.
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Mostly agree, 98% of requests are unrealistic. Most of these requests are not even simple.
But many times, things ARE fucked. And when that happen - dear gamers, don't curse devs, as a team. There was shitty ceo, who couldnt make a straight decision or changed them 200 times a day, because felt some popular new feature totally must be in the game, that ruined whole concept. Many times, the concept were shitty from the start, then blame director of that. Even more often, publishers pushes their financial decision over dev team (hello Helldivers2 vs Sony). Yet another time, some lawsuit shitstorm happens, that makes devs scrap something (hello Palworlds vs big_n). And many times, its all together.
If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they're clearly idiots.
If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you're estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that's because you (as a company) coded your software badly.
Alternative reasons (not mutually exclusive):
- The organization has outdated policies that make delivering changes difficult.
- The systems used in development and delivery haven't been invested in enough to automate repetitive steps, optimize workflow, and increase safety of changes.
Again, complex changes are obviously going to take more time, but if the simplest changes take significant time or effort then something is wrong.
6 months doesn't sound unrealistic for re-doing a menu system. Designing, reworking art, re-programming workflows and then testing everything can take several months. Even just the logistics of releasing it after it's done, that alone can take a month.
Yes, it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work that has to be prioritized with the scope of the project and the team members available.
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
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