I'm sure that whatever project you're assigned to has a lot of optimization stuff in the backlog that you'd love to work on but haven't had a chance to visit because bugfixes, new features, etc. I'm sure the process at Arrowhead is not much different.
For sure, duplicating those assets on PC installs turned out to be the wrong call.
But install sizes were still pretty reasonable for the first 12+ months or so. I think it was ~40-60GB at launch. Not great but not a huge deal and they had mountains of other stuff to focus on.
When the documented worst case is 5x you prepare for the potential bad news that you will hit 2.5x to 5x in your own code. Not assume it will be 10x and preemptively act, keeping your users from installing three other games.
In my experience it's always been quite a battle to spend time on perf.
I'll happily take a demotion if I make a 10x performance goof like that. As long as I can get promoted eventually if I make enough 10x wins.
People are more likely to thank me after the fact than cheer me on. My point, if I have one, is that gaming has generally been better about this but I don’t really want to work on games. Not the way the industry is. But since we are in fact discussing a game, I’m doing a lot of head scratching on this one.
Never trust a report that highlights the outliers before even discussing the mean. Never trust someone who thinks that is a sane way to use of statistics. At best they are not very sharp, and at worst they are manipulating you.
> We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
Ok, now that's absolutely ridiculous and treating the reader like a complete idiot. "We took the absolute best case scenario reported by something we read somewhere, and doubled it without giving a second thought, because WTF not?. Since this took us 5 seconds to do, we went with that until you started complaining".
Making up completely random numbers on the fly would have made exactly the same amount of sense.
Trying to spin this whole thing into "look at how smart we are that we reverted our own completely brain-dead decision" is the cherry on top.