Comment by brokencode
5 years ago
Successful people and businesses can be wrong. You are not making a case for why those development practices are okay, but are simply appealing to authority.
I and most other customers would argue that 6 minute loading times are atrocious, and if there is an easy fix like this, it makes me lose a lot of respect for the developer who doesn’t fix it. It maybe would even make me avoid them in the future.
A reputation is built over years, but can be lost pretty much instantly. Companies have to continue serving their customers to enjoy ongoing success.
They didn’t make an appeal to authority but an appeal to commercial success, and they’re right on.
The fact that GTAO is so popular should make most HNers rethink what they know about the commercial necessity of optimization vs building a compelling product.
The loading times were not initially that long and then the slow CPU makes a big difference.
This really only goes to show how much you can get away with if you have an outstandingly popular product that has no direct competition. Chances are that your product is not that compelling, if it performs poorly, that will hurt adoption. It will never become outstandingly popular in the first place.