> Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this?

Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest rates being high.

Calling out that something is "easy" and "fun" is likely insulting to the developers who are frequently working 70-80hour weeks sand ruining their family life in the process.

They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch.

In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city builder where citizens have agency, the game is effectively a god simulator where your biggest challenge is traffic management, economy or politics is a joke)

This is why many people prefer older games - the amount of effort spent on the gameplay itself is only decreasing year by year, while most of the budget is spent on useless graphical effects, quirky things everyone forgets in two months and all the usual "analytics"/"cloud" stuff.

None of that is the engineers' fault. All that comes from the game directors and business people.

And for very good reasons. A huge fraction of players buy the game based on how it looks.

Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features.

Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have.

Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected.

It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know.

But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see.

If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the facts.

I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to manage it.

It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in making an actually playable game, which indicates that the problem is not something inherent but a simple product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see Creative Assembly's meltdown)

As scope increases all the organizational challenges balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous project and ready for the next phase of this new project to get to where you need them to start design levels and assets? It's much easier to fix if the additional 3 month of development is just 3 months cost of living for John Romero and John Carmack.

it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat. look at old games' credits, you'll find maybe even bigger studios (making art and programming with limited hardware was much more time-consuming....) but they had good gameplay on a much smaller budget. Today, studios waste money on analytics, governance things and other fluff...

Best case study is Mojang, the company has over 800 employees but it is literally outperformed in game design and update quality/quantity by ten people at Re-Logic. (which includes managers and legal as well!)

> it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat

Are you serious? Teams have increased massively. Super Mario Kart for example had less than 20 people working on it. That's not even the size of the audio department for many modern AAA games

Terraria started off as a 2D homage to Minecraft...The very first release basically was just a 2D version of Minecraft. It took a few updates for Terraria to become its own thing.

I enjoy both games, especially Terraria, which I have played since its original release. But let's not lie to ourselves that the volume of content updates for Terraria is anywhere close to the updates that Minecraft has received. Adding content for a 2D game is a lot easier than adding content for a 3D game, even if you're using voxels.

IMO, the parent picked a terrible example. Comparing any game to "Minecraft" doesn't make much sense to me. What even is Minecraft at this point? There seem to be a multiple versions on a multitude of platforms, some on the same platform targeting different demographics. Different changes are need to keep the different demographics hooked. Of course the original was built by a single guy which avoided all the organizational complexities.

The indies that don't make a viable product, you don't see.

That's just bias on your part.

You don't see the thousands of indie games that were never released because the creators screwed it up, or they ran out of money.

Or the indie studios who never made a second game because they didn't recoup their costs.

Indies that fail just fold and you never hear about them. AAA that fail release their games.

Sure, but this is Paradox, a company that constantly makes buckets of money on DLC for Stellaris, Europa universalis, crusader kings, etc. I doubt they were about to run out of money. They just had to release a new race of scantily dressed aliens for stellaris and they’d be good for another half a year.

Paradox is just the publisher, it's developed by Colossal Order.

Pardon the snark, but the answer should be obvious: budget and deadlines.

Producing well-optimized, “clever” code usually requires magnitudes of more time than the simplest, quickest solution. Hobbyists line yourself, and a few companies like Nintendo, are typically the only ones that can afford to spend time optimizing like you describe.

I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove the teeth in one go.

Sure. Who is gonna prioritize that? Engineers likely have no discretionary time left and are even working weekends. Even on a web project I've been on, I had PM complaint every meeting about loading times of a admin interface. I told them every time that they should than prioritize the pagination ticket I had written. After a months of this shit, I took time out of my Saturday and just added it. I wouldn't have done that if I had already had to work nights and weekends.

Working overtime is just insane to me. Why can't you just ignore the PM and do it during normal hours?

What are they going to do? Fire you?

Not blaming the engineers! The problem is structural or from managers and higher ups.

This is why most non technical business school types can fuck right off, i’ve rarely seen them make anything better.

Managers with either dev or design experience is the only thing that works.

I don't buy that excuse. To me it seems more like game developers have become complacent with the powerful hardware consumers have at their disposal, especially on PCs, and the fact they can always push fixes after the release. Decades ago it used to be a major milestone when a game "went gold". It meant QA was successful and that the game was fully playable. Budget and deadlines also existed back then, but there was (usually) much more care taken to ensure a good gaming experience, regardless of the hardware. Saying that only a few companies can do this successfully today is excusing objectively bad development practices.

Consumers should vote with their wallet, and stop preordering and falling for preorder bonuses and marketing hype, which is another disease affecting modern gaming. Unfortunately, publishers know that they can release a lackluster product based on hype alone (No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077), and then spend years "polishing" a game into a state they promised before the initial release. The modern gaming industry is rife with scams like these to the point that it should be heavily regulated. So, no, none of these companies can be excused for releasing a garbage product and charging full price for it.

> I don't buy that excuse.

This means you are, sadly, very uninformed. There is a lot of rolling with the punches in the games industry, and many engineers want to optimize things more, and work OT to do so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to do this in AAA space on company time).

> This means you are, sadly, very uninformed.

No, it means that I don't accept budget and deadlines being an excuse for delivering a poor experience. As a consumer, I'm speculating about the reasons why this happens, but my point is that it shouldn't happen at all.

> many engineers want to optimize things more, and work OT to do so (as there is an extreme shortage of time to do this in AAA space on company time)

Again, this is an industry problem, and not something companies should be excused for.

Whether engineers actually care about optimizing or not, and whether they crunch or not (as much as I may sympathize), is not my concern, and I place equal blame on them for delivering a subpar product, whether it's under their control or not. Ultimately their names will be listed in the credits, and they represent the product as much as the publisher. If they don't like the environment of a particular studio, they can always choose to work elsewhere.

> I place equal blame on them for delivering a subpar product, whether it's under their control or not.

What else is there to say...

> If they don't like the environment of a particular studio, they can always choose to work elsewhere.

They like it. The industry just has issues beyond their control which are in the process of being solved, gradually. No one will drop their dream job to satisfy your entitlement right now, sorry to say. You are free to not buy the game.

I'm entitled because I want to buy a product that works as advertised?

> You are free to not buy the game.

Yes, I'll continue to do so. I just wish other consumers did the same so that this situation can improve. The first step is not excusing it when it happens, but condemning it.

Really? Shipping logs with 100k vertices and people with individually rendered teeth is an "obvious budget and deadlines" issue?

It strikes me as a "how many idiots are in a position to make important decisions on this game" issue, or "how generally competent is the development team" issue.

I typed something very similar in parallel with you. Guess the engineering typically required is no more? At least not here.

Pay peanuts get monkeys. Game dev has been infamous for taking in young, fresh college graduates, promise them "credits" and "fun life" and then run them through the grinder for shit pay. And eventually, even those who survived the grinder and ended up living long enough to become seniors burn out, and that's how you get this kind of clusterfuck in the end.

Game dev seriously needs to follow the VFX industry and unionize. I have zero trust left in fellow gamers to not buy games from unethical producers.

Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut. Insulting engineers and describing them as "monkeys" because you are unaware of businesses function is quite unwarranted. "Real engineers" need to take a real look at themselves!

"Pay peanuts get monkeys" is a proverb.

> Make people work 12 hour days to ship before you go out of business and corners will need to get cut.

Won't happen. The US barely has any employment laws, and so do many other countries of the world.

What won't happen?

As long as the government doesn't ban employing people for 12 hours and more straight for weeks, and actually enforces that ban, there will always be enough employers doing so, and enough people willing to go through with it "for the credits".

Especially in am industry that sees depressed wages because it's the dream job for many.

I'm still not sure what from my original statement won't happen.

Colossal Order is in Finland and Paradox Interactive is in Sweden, both of which have strong employment laws.

Game dev in general is that way, but my impression was that Colossal Order had traditionally been a little better than most. I suppose I may have been mistaken.

We make faster hardware and software will bloat to consume it.[1][2][3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

> Reminds me of the state of frontend development where you need 8000 tools and dependencies to show even the simplest of things, and i'm not surprised they bundle React for the menus.

Correction: React/Web technlogy is responsible for all the UI, from the loading screens to in-game labels when using road tools and everything in-between.

And their implementation of Coherent Gameface is not the reason for the performance issues in the game, so not sure how it's even relevant.

I think parent meant to imply there is a similarly wasteful culture in frontend development so of course they'd use react for menus and labels.

Most of the revenue comes in after, long after release. So it now makes sense to release an unfinished game and use the revenue to pay for the improvements.