It's Time To Rediscover Optimization

As I write this the consumer market has plunged head first into a global DRAM shortage. Surprise, surprise, this is a direct consequence of the AI boom causing companies to outbid every other industry to buy DRAM to build their huge AI cathedrals (data centres). With AI vacuuming as much DRAM into itself as possible to prove it's value to the market, all other industries that rely on this resource have to increase prices.

Why would they not? NVIDIA as proven that choking the market supply and then charging excessively more has worked for their graphics cards when the crypto markets created the exact same vacuum as they were willing to pay much more than consumers. At the end of the day DRAM and graphics cards are now both considered business expenses that can be written off and the profit created justifies overpaying. No harm no foul if the business fails. The market still has not really recovered from the crypto demand for graphics cards, the DRAM shortage now places additional strain on not just graphics cards, but consumer compute in general. Not to mention that NVIDIA has declared themselves an AI first company directly focusing on AI hardware and scaling back their production on consumer grade graphics cards.

This sucks. This sucks, not just because I have a graphics card from nearly a decade ago, but companies have been using cheap hardware as an excuse to create sloppy software. It's a meme, Windows uses 4GB of RAM at idle, Chrome is a living breathing memory leak, triple A games on release day couldn't run at 60 FPS if you threw a nuclear reactors worth of computing power at it. Why optimize your products when consumers can simply solve this problem by consuming more product?

Well consumer computing is staring down a brick wall. Sure some people are always willing to pay up, but I can assure you the average person at home is not. AMD is the budget option and their RX 9060 XT 8GB sits around $500 CAD. This graphics card has only 8GB of VRAM which is considered nearly unacceptable in the modern gaming space, but why? What are we getting for these games that are pushing the perpetual graphical envelope? I played two games this December: Hollow Knight: Silk Song, and Clair Obscure Expedition 33.

Hollow Knight: Silk Song could run on a toaster. As with a lot of 2D indie developed games there's no giant strain on the system. It ran at 4K 60FPS as expected the entire time with my GTX 2070. My system from nearly a decade ago is overkill for this brand new game. Expedition 33 however did not fair as well. A quick search online will find many users struggling to get this game to run at a consistent frame rate with 16GB of VRAM suggested for optimal performance. I'm sorry but this game is nothing special to look at, and has battle mechanics that could be entirely done in 2D. 3D is an artistic choice obviously, I'm not trying to stand on a soapbox and 2D > 3D but when a game is in 3D it's like they have full permission to ignore game optimization. Most 2D games are actually rendered in 3D in modern games simply because graphics hardware is so streamlined for 3D rendering it's more efficient to do it that way. Expedition 33 has completely contained battle scenes with turn based combat. You're trying to tell me there's no way they could prebake some of these animations that are going to play so I don't get frame drops during either my or the enemies attack? I say this simply out of the frustration that the entirety of Expedition 33's mechanics could have released in the Game Cube era and if it had frame drops like this back then it would have been roasted alive for being unoptimized. I'm not against something looking pretty, but why is how a game runs seemingly not prioritized at all?

In this scenario Expedition 33 is only a handy scapegoat for a problem affecting the industry at large. It won every single game award this year so obviously people like it, even if I think my beloved Silk Song is better that's a personal opinion. Here's an even more direct example. The game Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door did in fact release on the Game Cube and it ran at a solid 60FPS. Nintendo remade this game and for some reason frame rate dropped to 30FPS. Why in the name of all that is holy could they not get a game with the aesthetic of flat paper on cardboard backgrounds to run at a resolution of 1080p with 60FPS? They made graphical upgrades sure, more advanced lighting systems, higher resolution paper texture or whatever, but really and truly you cannot tell me this is some kind of impossible task. If they prioritized performance I guarantee you it could run at 60FPS and it would be almost impossible to tell which graphical features they cut out. Game Freak is out here releasing Pokemon games with trees that look at home on an N64 with frame dips into the single digits and then at the same time showing off games like Beast of Reincarnation which prove they do really know what a tree looks like and what a respectable frame rate is when they care.

Expedition 33 developers previously worked for Ubisoft and I'm sure that they learned the lesson that effort in does not necessarily result in profit out. Expedition 33 developed on a ballpark similar budget to Silk Song, a shorter timeline, and a higher retail price resulted in similar sales. Expedition 33 was obviously optimized to make money and that it did. However there's something the Silk Song developers are making and that's a reputation for quality. When a developer has a reputation for performance, quality, and care put into their games they garner an audience willing to trust their next release. Heck, the reputation they earned with Hollow Knight was so good people were willing to wait 8 years and then buy Silk Song in record numbers sight unseen on launch day. I don't know if the Expedition 33 developers accomplished the same. Many people like the game, but I don't know if it lead to the kind of impact where when the next game from Sandfall Interactive gets announced that people will be turning up in droves for it.

We're at an economic point where people have less and less discretionary income available to spend on video games, PC hardware is more expensive than it's ever been, and to me personally it seems like video game developers have cashed in huge quantities of good will they earned in between 2003 - 2015. Nintendo who used to operate almost exclusively on the budget spectrum is cashing in on the good will of the Switch to charge more not just for Switch 2 hardware, but started increasing the retail price of some first party video games at a record high $80 USD. Variable pricing they call it. Nintendo is trying to price it's hardware and games as highly premium products and I suspect that will not work out for them in the long run as people seem to be catching on that the value is not matching what they expected for the price they paid.

Companies are in the business of making a profit, but perhaps now is the time to start reinvesting the the economy of consumer trust. It's feels like that trust has been stretched thin, and ET has proven that the trust can reach a breaking point. Nintendo themselves were critical players in reviving the video game market after the crash, introducing the Nintendo Seal of Quality. They wouldn't allow games to be sold as cash grabs on their console, they had to go through a review process to ensure they were of a sufficiently high enough quality. I don't believe an authoritarian overview of video game optimization is the solution but I think consumers are going to become more and more quality conscious as we go. Personally I know I've been burned on games that did not meet my expectations from developers I previously trusted. Game publishers are still trying to sell games on pre-order but customers are no longer engaging with the system as it is nearly a guarantee the game will be available physically at launch if desired, but more importantly is it safer. Why would anyone put money on the table nowadays for a video game before you can confirm if it will actually play well and have the type of content you want to justify the purchase. A triple A video game used to be a near guaranteed banger on release and it now is nearly guaranteed to require multiple critical fixes, but that micro-transaction cash shop to buy skins is flawless. It's about priority. Unless the video game industry can figure out how to put the customer back at the centre of the products they deliver the industry will decline. I hesitate to say it will die as corporations making such huge amounts of profit will puppeteer the empty husk of the industry as long as they can wring a dollar out of it. If the big studios don't want to hemorrhage market share to developers working out of their basement maybe it's time to start caring about the experience again.