Said it in the other thread, but will say it here. The problem is neither the engine nor the developers. It's the fact that the publishers demand very rapid timelines while understaffing their development teams so that they can maximize profits. If gaming companies staffed their development teams like a health-care or social media company did, and paid them akin to how they are paid in these industries, then the games would come out well-optimized and beautiful. Instead game developers are paid the lowest of any software engineers in any industry (with the sorry excuse of "gaming is interesting and attracts engineers") and expected to do the most hours with the most understaffing.
I've been working on a UE5 project in my spare time, for fun, and getting nanite and lumen (which I might replace with a custom ray-tracing solution) to optimal levels on a mid-ranged GPU (RTX 4060 mobile) took about 10 hours or so. When connecting an RTX 4090 (via eGPU) these optimizations/tuning scaled as expected. But if I were part of a project where I had to play catch-up on work tasks or slowed down by project managers, I likely wouldn't even have bothered, prioritizing actually getting working, non-buggy output instead as the scope creep, wasteful scrum sessions, and short timelines pressured me to do so.
EDIT: Personally I think the best firm-structure for excellent creative, optimized, polished games are producer cooperatives like Valve where the developers, designers, and artists are also invested in the company. Some employee-friendly companies like Nintendo (who would have their executives get pay cuts before layoffs) can also emulate this, but I think that is rare.
EDIT 2: Just to put things in perspective, Senior Software Engineers in the video game industry make at the median roughly what an entry-level Software Engineer makes for a large health-care company here in the U.S, and they're more likely than the health-care industry Software Engineer to live in a high-cost of living area. Why would talented engineers work for $90,000 per year in coastal California or Washington D.C area, when they can make $130,000 in Conway, Arkansas? Because it is more interesting work?
Last edited by sc94597 - on 29 August 2025
