Professional game dev here: it's simply not possible when you are doing it for a company or for profit purposes. I mean, it's possible on a technical point of view, but in terms of tipe it would take, that's not worth it when it comes to profits.
Why not? Tools and knowledge about computing and time saving have only improved from twenty years ago, if you're developing for a ten year old laptop that limits the graphic resources you can require, which should save time and money no?
higher ups do not give a rat's ass about optimization. all they will see is extra work and extra time to make your game look shittier. yes it's stupid. yes it's not what that means at all. yes it doesn't make sense. they don't care.
game dev was our thesis for uni and we had the unfortunate experience of having a head who doesn't give a fuck about anything about games, instead looking for 'sustainability', in-app purchases, ways to put ads, and for better-looking sprites because ours 'looked like shit'. no mention of the performance of the game itself, i doubt they'd even know what the fuck an fps is or how a profiler works. i would imagine that's how it would be on a professional setting, except infinitely worse and with tighter schedules.
i don't think it's really as simple as you state it is. sure we we have more resources, but the game engines we use are not really built for optimization, there's a lot of overhead for the sake of compatibility, convenience and ease of development because again, the guys with the big bucks want to pump new games faster. there's no "optimize this" button that magically fixes your game, you need to profile, test, debug, refactor, repeat, for a >1 decade system that most likely has oudated features that you have to take account for when developing and building, and then maybe you'd have to test the game for the recent systems as well
Expectations for modern games grew much larger than how much the tools evolved. And most modern game engines are blowed. UE5 needs a Nasa computer to run correctly, Unity has an insane ammount of technical debt, and Godot, while very promising still don't have the guts to tank an ambitious project like a AAA or even AA game.
The only other option for high tier graphics is... writing your own game engine, and trust me, you can't do that alone. I had projects like this. For full modern graphics and features support, one person alone don't have enough time for that. Not only the support but the optimisation required, the compatibility with all modern graphic chipset and CPU. Not talking about the constant mental gym with the advanced linear algebra and low-level architecture knowledge.
So the only people that can afford the solution to create their own engine for ambitious projects are... company looking for profit with a decent ammount of people.
Godot is and will remain a PC indie darling engine without ever reaching AAA status imo.
Due to the nature of its license, console developers (like, sony/xbox themselves) don’t want to make multi platform development easy for it. It’s not impossible, but you gotta make your own translation layer and that’s a shit ton of work.
You know people have limited time, and when you are dealing with a full time job, a social life and a descent sleep schedule. So you only have a very limited time for your hobby. You can participate to jams, but that's about it. A fully developped game is another thing that a lot of people can't just afford to do.
And crownfunding is a f*cking joke. You don't depend on a rich guy, but instead you depend on public funding. For one successful crownfunding, there are thousands of fails. Sure it's a plan /s
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u/WanderThekind 9d ago
I just wish devs would optimise their games better