Comment by sillysaurusx
5 years ago
If loading times were prioritized, features would be cut. Which features would you cut out of the game in order to have fast loading times?
This is what you'd need to decide. And then afterwards, it might not print as much money as you think it will.
It's easy looking at it from the outside. Not so easy from the inside.
Did you read the article? Zero features needed to be cut, this is a 30 minute fix.
Building the engine alone takes 30 minutes after each change. You're not going to get anything done in 30 minutes. And the more you work on this, the less you're working on shippable features that make money.
In the mobile space, an app opening faster is so valuable you can make a career out of just that. I haven't worked desktop/console games, but having load times be 6 minutes longer than it needs to be, when you're trying to make money on ongoing microtransactions, has got to be losing you so much more money than the time spent fixing.
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This feature would bring in millions of dollars on its own. When your customer base is earning you $1 billion per year a 1% improvement is $10 million per year. You could hire an entire team of 100 engineers for that salary just to fix this single bug.
> Which features would you cut out of the game in order to have fast loading times?
If this is a serious question, I'd say cut any of the new vehicles introduced in the last 2 years. None of them are nearly as impactful as this optimization. In fact, I am having issues imagine any individual feature at all that's as important as this fix.
I’d have to have been there, seen the list of features with eng estimates and trade offs, but yes I would have happily made the call to chuck one of them if it meant a measurably higher quality product, like this massive load time improvement. Hell, that zoom-out-zoom-in animation when you switch characters probably took as much time to code as it would have to fix this bug. I think anyone with good product sense and the balls to make a priority call that might get someone upset could make the right call here.
But after it's already made record-breaking profits and is a huge cash cow with recurring revenue. You could just say "hey, I'll hire one single contract developer to do these kinds of quality of life things" and make a fraction less profit.
> make a fraction less profit
Unfortunately this part often kills quality initiatives. Why fix bugs for your existing customers when you can deploy the engineering resources on a DLC or a sequel which will milk those customers for more? There is no more craftsmanship or pride in good work left in software.
"When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." -Steve Jobs