Comment by acdha
5 years ago
> actually measure performance and try to improve it
This really rings truest to me: I find it hard to believe nobody ever plays their own game but I’d easily believe that the internal culture doesn’t encourage anyone to do something about it. It’s pretty easy to imagine a hostile dev-QA relationship or management keeping everyone busy enough that it’s been in the backlog since it’s not causing crashes. After all, if you cut “overhead” enough you might turn a $1B game into a $1.5B one, right?
Lots of possibilities. Another one I imagined is that "only the senior devs know how to use a profiler, and they're stuck in meetings all the time."
I could easily imagine variations of that where this is in maintenance mode with a couple of junior programmers because the senior ones either burnt out or moved on to another project. I’ve definitely gotten the impression that most games studios have roughly the same attitude towards their employees as a strip-miner has towards an Appalachian hilltop.
If this were anyone else but Rockstar, I'd agree with you.
But Rockstar essentially only have GTA and Red Dead to take care of, it's not like they're making an annual title or something :)
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