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this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Welllll… everything in software development is trade-offs.
It’s honestly pretty rare that one solution is unequivocally “better” than another, across every dimension you might care about (which includes non-technical things).
The kinds of egregious defects you might think of as brazen incompetence or laziness are more often the result of everyone (technical and non-technical alike) refusing the actively pursue one side of a trade-off and hoping that the devs can just “nerd harder”.
Technical constraints as in the case of the N64 example can actually help avoid the “just nerd harder” fallacy, because they prompt serious discussions about what you can and can’t compromise on.
Ironically, when we sit here as users and complain about games not being optimized in this way or that, we’re also refusing to engage in a conversation about trade-offs and insisting that devs just “nerd harder”.
Edit: That’s not to provide any excuses for the blatant financialization of the industry which prompts the whole “don’t trade off anything, just have them nerd harder” mindset… but to warn yall that even if the market wasn’t ruled by greedy suits, we would probably still be feeling like old games managed to do more with less, cuz well… trading away 500MB of bundle size so you can get better logging of resource management in production wasn’t really an option.
Oh yeah?
What's the tradeoff for not making 4k textured an optional download?
Theyre chasing a pixel fidelity higher than most peoples TVs at the cost of everyone's disk space
Having two different configurations of assets requires making a system that can switch between them, separate deployments for them, some way to actually fetch the asset pack by the users, testing to make sure both configurations work correctly, actually deploying the separate asset pack during an update, and then spending time fixing bugs that inevitably come up with any added complexity.
Could they do it? Absolutely. Should they do it? Probably.
Would there be no downside, no tradeoff? Claiming so is plainly ridiculous.
Lol except that were talking images here, not domain specific matrices or something.
The complexity it'd take to optimise an engine for a SPECIFIC image size would be orders of magnitude harder than using any preexisting tools that support all images.
Its like rationalising why you can't go in an area of a map cause the devs didnt test every single possible renderable frame in that area - sure its possible, but you'd be laughed out of every meeting for even suggesting it.
Also gotta ask, do you think updates have to redownload every single file of the game? Else why would they redeploy static images every update? (Because arguably the most common optimisations on the web exist for this exact situation, not having to resend large media files)
Don't they already have to switch between assets to fit in lower-end sized VRAM?
Higher-ups noticed gamers think "realistic" = "good" and blame developers instead of executives for the resulting problems.
Ok but like, Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 edition + DLC is going to be 1mb smaller than the Switch 1 version without the DLC
Trade offs between "let's release this unfinished piece of junk NOW" and "let's spend couple of months more and ensure the code is optimised and without major bugs".
...and then there's Star Citizen...