| Bristow9091 said: This seems to be a more common thing these days, where the PC version runs worse than its console counterparts since developers are either just bad or lazy when it comes to optimising. |
I don't think we should call them lazy or bad at it. It's not easy at all with the high bar we have today for visuals. Budgets are getting huge and development times are increasing. It's hard to make a commercially viable product. The fixed specs on consoles help a bit so it's faster to make everything work decently, even if you won't get the best visuals in the world.
Developers at big companies always report working overtime frequently and tons of pressure paired with impossible deadlines. These guys are on the limit. I guess that companies behind platforms and game engines should invest in tools to speed up development and reduce costs even more than they do today or we will reach a point where the evolution of games won't be dictated by hardware, but by the budget. The latter already plays an important role today, but it's not a hard constrant yet.
Crytek tried to ignore budget limits and push hardware to the limit and they ended up almost bankrupt.
The other downside is that this budget increases are a reason for devs to try to squeeze more from the userbase with DLCs and microtransactions. Just look at Rockstar. They released games almost yearly, but since 2013 their output slowed down a lot. Simply because they found a huge cash cow on microtransactions in GTA Online. I fear that, someday, the AAA market could end up like the mobile one, but with a 60 bucks initial cost on top of all the microtransactions.
