Learn-Not-To-Waste-Resources Studios.

I think people are missing a point here. The game itself runs perfectly fine on a 7 year old CPU and 8GB of ram(it might run on 4GB but I haven't tested this personally). - I'd say the actual game client is optimized extremely well.

Is it really shocking that dev machines have a lot of ram?

If someone works in full frame photography or edits 4K video, do you tell them to try working on machines with 4GB of ram to see what they come up with, and how it's going to be "beneficial"?

Why would it be any different for games? When a level designer loads the entire map into editor, it's the same as loading a 4K video into Adobe Premiere - it's going to eat up your ram, and you need to have loads of it.

>>Who in hell does run a game server on a laptop, and outside office?

At E3, the answer is - literally everyone. We send one guy with a fully encrypted beefy laptop that runs all servers during the show, and he has to keep an eye on it 100% of the time. You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.

Well, we did that too. But yes, the standard is to slim down everything to fit on a 32G hex core workstation laptop.

Because they can travel with people and desktop computers.. kinda.. can't.

> You're not going to fly a desktop over the Atlantic just for a games conference.

Why not fly just an encrypted SSD with the game and buy desktop at the location?

I suppose that would work, but a one-time big laptop purchase that is then owned by the studio is easier to justify than buying a machine abroad(not to mention you can test that the laptop works several times before going, a brand new desktop might/might not work and people usually arrive a day or two before a conference so it's not like there's loads of time to debug problems before the big show).

With counter-terrorism, I would hope companies then have a contingency plan for governments imminently banning laptops on international flights.

With global inventories, it shouldn't be that hard for major vendors like Dell or Apple to offer an identical configuration to drop a hard drive into.