alt Hacker News> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost
They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it.
If they were on the hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.
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It is a trade-off. The game was developed on a discontinued engine, the game has had numerous problems with balance, performance and generally there were IMO far more important bugs. Super Helldive difficulty wasn't available because of performance issues.
I've racked up 700 hours in the game and the storage requirements I didn't care about.
> They’re not the ones bearing the cost.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true... Customers have limited space for games; it's a lot easier to justify keeping a 23GB game around for occasional play than it is for a 154GB game, so they likely lost some small fraction of their playerbase they could have retained.
Studios store a lot of builds for a lot of different reasons. And generally speaking, in AAA I see PlayStation being the biggest pig so I would wager their PS builds are at least the same size if not larger. People knew and probably raised alarm bells that fell to the wayside because it's easier/cheaper to throw money at storage solutions than it is engineering.
> I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements
I have to check. You're assumption is correct. I am one of very few.
I don't know the numbers and I'm gonna check in a sec but I'm wondering whether the suppliers (publishers or whoever is pinning the price) haven't screwed up big time by driving prices and requirements without thinking about the potential customers that they are going to scare away terminally. Theoretically, I have to assume that their sales teams account for these potentials but I've seen so much dumb shit in practice over the past 10 years that I have serious doubts that most of these suits are worth anything at all, given that grown up working class kids--with up to 400+ hours overtime per year, 1.3 kids on average and approx. -0.5 books and news read per any unit of time--can come up with the same big tech, big media, economic and political agendas as have been in practice in both parts of the world for the better part of our lives--if you play "game master" for half a weekend where you become best friends with all the kiosks in your proximity.
> the effect on their bottom line is negligible
Is it, though? My bold, exaggerated assumption is that they would have had 10% more sales AND players.
And the thing is, that at any point in time when I, and a few I know, had time and desire to play, we would have had to either clean up our drives or invest game price + sdd price for about 100 hours of fun over the course of months. We would have gladly licked blood but no industry promises can compensate for even more of our efforts than enough of us see and come up with at work. As a result, at least 5 buyers and players lost, and at work and elsewhere you hear, "yeah, I would, if I had some guys to play with" ...
Which goes to show, that they don't care about the user, but only about the user's money.
The problem they fixed is that they removed a common optimization to get 5x faster loading speeds on HDDs.
That's why they did the performance analysis and referred to their telemetry before pushing the fix. The impact is minimal because their game is already spending an equivalent time doing other loading work, and the 5x I/O slowdown only affects 11% of players (perhaps less now that the game fits on a cheap consumer SSD).
If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in.