Comment by thrwyoilarticle
5 years ago
The popular view is that companies who write software know how to prioritise, so if a problem like this isn't fixed, it's because they've done the calculations and decided it's not worthwhile.
I disagree. If there are no internal incentives for the people who know how to fix this to fix it, or if there's no path from them thinking fixing it could improve revenues to being assigned the ticket, things like this won't get fixed. I can fully believe the load times will result in fewer users and lower expenditure.
I think we'll see this happen with Facebook Messenger. Both the apps and the website have become slow and painful to use and get worse every month. I think we'll start to see engagement numbers dropping because of this.
You have just described why I laugh anytime someone complains that government is inefficient. ANY organization of sufficient size is "inefficient" because what a large organization optimizes for (for reasons I cannot explain) cannot align with what that organization's customers want optimized.
With the added difference that governments also have to be far more procedural by virtue of the way they are set up. Regardless of size they are accountable and responsible to a far higher degree in the eyes of the population they represent so there is a legitimate reason to be "slow".
In games the added reason to be slow is that game code is by definition some of the least mission critical code one could find (competes with 90% of the internet web code). Your Linux or Windows code might run a hospital's infrastructure or a rover on another planet. A game on the other hand can launch with bugs the size of your windshield, and can stay like that forever as long as people still pay. And people will pay because games are not unlike a drug for many people.
As such most game coding teams and coders are "trained" to cut every corner and skimp on every precaution. They're not needed beyond a very low baseline as far as software is concerned.
Look at the amount of bugs or cheats incredibly popular games like GTA or CoD have. These are billion dollar a year franchises that leave all this crap on the table despite all the money they make. They have all the resources needed, it's a conscious call to proceed like this, to hire teams that will never be qualified enough to deliver a high quality product and will be encouraged to cut corners on top of that.
Source: a long time ago I worked for a major game developer in a senior management role (unrelated to the dev activity) and left after feeling like "facepalm" for too long in every single SM meeting.
Remember this story from a few days ago?
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/arranging-invis...
I've seen plenty of interesting bugs, best I found personally was a compiler that was outputting files 1 byte at a time.
Games are riff with these sorts of bugs, but the volume of released games vs other types of software makes any sort of comparison unfair.
2 replies →
> for reasons I cannot explain
Any sufficiently large institution, over time, will prioritise self-preservation over achieving their core mission. This is sociology 101. Once a company has enough users to make it hard or impossible to measure immediate performance, self-preservation is achieved with internal manoeuvering and selling to execs.
Whats the remedy? apart from reducing the size of the organisation
13 replies →
Organizations are like spheres. Only a small part of the sphere has an exposed surface that is in contact with the outside world. As you grow the sphere most of the mass will be inside the sphere, not near the surface.
And I laugh every time people claim that it is only governments that can be inefficient. Most large commercial companies are inefficient and almost not functioning at all.
That the process breaks down in some cases doesn't mean they don't know how to prioritize. They clearly know how to prioritize well enough to make a wildly successful and enjoyable game. That doesn't mean no bad decisions were made over the last decade or so of development.
Like anything else, things will be as bad as the market allows. So I'd expect monopolies to do a worse and worse job of making good decisions and companies in competitive fields to do a better and better job over time. Thus the difference between TakeTwo and Facebook, and the need for lower cost of entry and greater competition in all economic endaevors where efficiency or good decision making is important.
Does it? Just because something is good or successful doesnt mean it was made well. Thats why we are seeing stories of crunch, failures of management compensated by extreme overwork.
Now you are moving the goalposts to a philosophical discussion as to what types of business you like or don't like, and I'm not sure any progress can be made with that approach. Some will share your values, others will find them repugnant, and in any case it doesn't have much bearing on rockstar load times.
1 reply →
> I think we'll see this happen with Facebook Messenger. Both the apps and the website have become slow and painful to use and get worse every month.
The messenger website has been atrocious for me lately. On my high-powered desktop, it often lags a bit, and on my fairly high-end laptop, it's virtually unusable. I thought it must be something I changed in my setup, but it's oddly comforting to hear that I'm not the only one with such issues.
For me it’s google maps, it has gotten so freaking slow both on mobile and on desktop. Actually google docs and sheet are the same.
Gmail. Typing in gmail is painfully laggy.
Try https://www.messenger.com/desktop
[tinfoil hat] A part of me believes that this was their intention in slowing down their browser site to the extent it has (and there is absolutely zero reason as to why it should load as slow as it does) in order to drive downloads for this application. [/tinfoil hat]
It's funny. That page says "A simple app that lets you text, video chat and stay close to people you care about." If it's so simple, then why does the browser version of the site take forever to load?
1 reply →
Unfortunately I'm on Linux, and they don't seem to provide a Linux client. I did try out https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine/, which worked really well, but I'm one of those weirdos who prefers websites to desktop apps.
> if a problem like this isn't fixed, it's because they've done the calculations and decided it's not worthwhile.
If it ever reached the point where it had to be an item in a priority list, it's already a failure. Some developer should have seen the quadratic behavior and fixed it. It's not the type of thing that should ever even be part of a prioritized backlog. It's a showstopper bug and it's visible for every developer.
> I can fully believe the load times will result in fewer users and lower expenditure.
Is GTA online still attracts new users in droves? I doubt.
If the old users live with the loading time for years, they are likely to continue living with it. It would be nice if Rockstar fixes it, but I doubt it would be anything except a PR win.
I rarely play it and the load time is actually the main factor. If I have an hour to play a game waiting for GTA V to load unfortunately feels like a waste of time and a chore, so I play something else.
Before GTA online they entertained themselves in other ways. Eventually, they'll move on. The more friction there is to continue playing GTA online, the easier it is for there to be something to pull them away. Rockstar are now competing to be a use of someone's time, not for them to buy the game.
1. people experiencing this issue have already bought the game, so there's little incentive here.
2. we can be reasonably sure people will buy newer GTA installments regardless of whether this bug is fixed or not.
but:
3. if there's still money to be made from microtransactions this is a huge issue and would absolutely be worthwhile, imo.
> I think we'll see this happen with Facebook Messenger. Both the apps and the website have become slow and painful to use and get worse every month. I think we'll start to see engagement numbers dropping because of this.
In fact, I think the iOS app for FB Messenger did get a redesign due to problems and it’s rewritten from scratch? I remember being pleasantly surprised after the big update… It became lightweight, integrates well with iOS and supports platform features.
On the other hand, the desktop app or the website is a shitshow :-(
The iOS app is really much more performant now than it was a couple of years ago. Significantly smaller, and quicker to start up
I would think this would be one of the biggest revenue / developer_time changes in company history, considering how incredibly profitable online is.