Comment by the_af
4 days ago
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
"You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game..." Uh, this is exactly what I do. What's so special about an app that launches apps that it needs to be left warm constantly?
Nothing special. It just sits there doing nothing, like many other programs in my setup. Some people start Steam on boot up.
If you don't, nothing special happens either: you just wait 7-10 seconds, hardly an eternity, and there's really no rush to firing up a videogame either. We're not talking in-game responsiveness, the only thing that truly matters.
It updates the games too. And there are social features (chat) that some people do actually use.
>You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there.
That's what I do. I don't really care how long it takes to start (within reason), since when I boot my computer I rarely start playing a game right away. I check my mail, then look at the news, and after that decide what I want to play. As long as it doesn't take more than five minutes or so, I won't even notice.