 I get it, a remastered game isn't as fancy of an overall as you had hoped. Maybe a collection of games from a big name company, let's just say Bethesda, continues to have the same consistent bugs game to game. Maybe there is a game breaking glitch in the latest AAA offering from EA. Heck, game file sizes seem bigger than anyone thinks they should be. Maybe there is a massive day one patch, or in the case of Switch, a game cart doesn't have the entire game on it and requires an additional download. These are all very, very frustrating things. And this is only the tip of the iceberg of complaints that run rampant around the video game fandoms. However, what is the common response to all of this? Developers? They're just lazy. Oh sure, there are lazy developers. The free asset flips with copy pasted publicly available code bases that barely even run on Steam is quite literally the definition of being a lazy developer. Heck, it's almost an insult to actual game developers to call those people developers. But I think this is a universally accepted thing, even among real game devs. The rest? I think we need to be awfully careful about calling a game developer, or the entire development studio, lazy. What does that word even mean, lazy? We all think we know, but let's just look at that dictionary definition. Unwilling to work, or use energy. This week, I've seen some Nintendo fans in particular call Rockstar developers lazy. Why is that? Well, because Red Dead Redemption 2 is 100GB install, and Bethesda stated such game sizes in regards to Elder Scrolls Online just are not possible to put on Switch. I mean, clearly, if Breath of the Wild can be 12GB, Rockstar is just lazy bastards twiddling their thumbs with a 100GB beast. Rockstar, the same company where some employees reporting in 100 hour work weeks to get this game done. Maybe if they weren't lazy, they wouldn't need to put in 100 hour work weeks, right? Look, evidence! The reality is, if a gamer says a developer is lazy, 99% of the time it's because that gamer doesn't actually know anything about game development. They draw straw man comparisons of games that are fundamentally made entirely different as justifications on why said game shouldn't have this one problem. Here, let me give you a small taste of game development talk. Real talk. This comes from a person who does graphic programming in video games, and is just the very beginning of explaining how, from a game development standpoint, that mirrors work and are made possible in video games. And yeah, those are the things we use every day in real life. Fill rate is how fast your GPU can calculate pixel values. At its simplest, it's a factor of how many pixels you draw on the screen, multiply by the complexity of the fragment shader, and all the factors that go into that, like texture fetches, texture cache performance, etc. It's also often the biggest factor in GPU performance. Adding a few operations to your fragment shaders slows it down by a multiple of how many pixels use that shader. For deferred shading engine, like what is used in stalker and newer Unreal Engine games, this is pretty much a factor of how many pixels are being affected by how many lights, in addition to base rendering costs that doesn't fluctuate too much. Pixels drawing on top of already drawn pixels is minimized, and you hopefully end up drawing each pixel on the screen once, plus the lights, which are drawn after the objects. For forward rendering systems, you might have the objects drawing over pixels that have already been rendered, effectively causing the time spent on those already rendered pixels to be wasted. Forward rendering is often considered the drawing of models to the screen, and doing somewhat costly queries to the scene graph to see what light effects and objects before rendering. The information about the light is sent to the shader when the object is drawn, and instead of after. Many engines use hybrid techniques because both techniques have drawbacks. Deferred can't do alpha, semi-transparent, or anti-aliasing well, so they draw the alpha effects after all the deferred objects, using traditional forward rendering techniques. Alpha objects are also often sorted black back to front, so they render on top of each other correctly. I'll actually have a link to in the description to the full explanation, because there's a whole much more that goes into this on how a mirror works in a video game, and it dives into things like the vertex, draw calls, skinning, ray casting, ray tracing, render to texture, and a bunch of other things to explain how what we think of as a simple flat mirror works in a game, along with their opinion that it's probably not actually worth doing, but that's an aside. All of this for one object in the game we as players interact with. But you understand how game development works, right? To the point you can say, beyond a doubt, because you don't like that there is this bug here, or a file size difference there, that developers are just lazy cookie cutters that aren't good at, nor even try at their jobs. Because when you call developers lazy, that's what you're telling them. All those hours you put in, all that time you busted your butt and maybe even missed your kids' birthdays and other family events as you passionately worked to complete a project, clearly all wasted time. Because you're lazy. You shouldn't have had kids or family. You should just be robots, working at maximum efficiency, 24-7, 365, making zero mistakes ever, so gamers can have their ideal world of gorgeous games, impeccable gameplay across every platform in existence from the Atari 2600 through the PlayStation 10 at maximum FPS with file sizes that aren't more than a few gigs. After all, because Doom on Switch could cut down from 60 gigs to 20 on Switch because of one dev team and panic button, the OG Doom developers, gosh, those lazy arseholes. This isn't to say developers can't be or get better. That isn't to say the process is always perfect. That isn't to say games are not worthy of criticism. I sometimes push $100 where it beaks myself right here on YouTube. That doesn't exempt me from being criticized. But I think it's important we don't boil down our criticisms to developers are lazy. Honestly, that is typically really far off from the truth. Instead, focus your criticisms pointedly. Don't draw comparisons that you don't actually understand. Yeah, Doom on Switch is 20 gigabytes, but why are the other versions 40 gigabytes more than that? Could those have been shrunk more? Maybe, maybe not. We don't honestly know. We don't know what was trimmed out that made the game only 20 gigabytes on Switch and how trimming more could have hurt the games and other platforms. We honestly don't know anything. So instead, this is how you criticize games, such as game sizes. I want game creators to care more about making manageable file sizes as a priority over other aspects of game making so I can use less storage on my device and have shorter install times. Honestly, I think that's a fair request. Many might counter that they would rather them just worry about making a great game, but alas, priorities. For you, you want something to be a certain way. You don't truly know how you can achieve such things and still get the games you want as they are. You just want it to be true. And that's fine, cool. You want Bethesda to stop having the same bugs. Instead of saying that because the developers are lazy, just say you would like Bethesda to clean up on some commonly known bugs. Don't call them lazy for the bugs existing, but that Bethesda should maybe care more about them during development. That, or you could argue, have a better testing team, but alas, we don't know why the bugs still exist. When we make blanketed assumptions of laziness, it's extremely insulting. As a content creator, someone whose job is severely less complex than that of a game developer, whenever I see someone call me or other creators lazy with little understanding of how our work is done, while we try to just shrug it off, it is grating. It does affect us. It does make us frustrated that we are called things that don't add up with reality. I mean, give you an example. You can think this is a lazily made video. The scripting for this video, the research for this video alone, took me more than five days and probably around 30 hours for one script. Lazy, huh? And I don't want game developers, a few which I have talked to before writing this to keep feeling as if we as gamers are taking their work for granted. To a point we want to keep saying they are bad at their jobs and all lazy when the facts don't really line up with that truth. None of us, even me in my limited experience developing games, truly know all the ins and outs of making a video game. Why is Red Dead Redemption 2 100 gigabytes while Breath of the Wild is only 12? I don't know. You don't know either. Why are bugs in a game? I don't know. Are remasters sometimes not more than we want them to be? Or like not as good as we hoped? I don't know. And you don't know either. None of us actually know. Instead of making blanketed insult-like assumptions, let's instead just let game makers know what we desire. And then ultimately it's up to them to decide if those desires line up with their own. These are their creations. Remember that, not ours. So we can be critical. We can demand better. But don't assume where the fault lies. What's to blame? How we know better without any actual experience and know how in the field. I have a great appreciation for this medium. And those that entertain me with their masterpieces, time and time again, year in and year out. Nothing is ever perfect or even ideal. But let's not forget why we game. And let's not forget to show the proper respect to those that are enabling us to do so. Even if things aren't exactly the way you want them to be. I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz from Nintendo Prime. And I wanna thank you guys for tuning in to this week's op-ed editorial. This editorial was made possible by all of our patrons over on patreon.com slash nintendoprime. This is a fully fan-funded ordeal. And I wanna thank you guys for that support. Also, we are giving away a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Switch Bundle down in the description. There's a link for those that wanna enter. And hey, if you really wanna help spread this video around to as many people as possible, hit that like button. It is now part of YouTube's algorithm that the more likes a video gets, the more of the subscribers of the channel it actually gives notifications to. I know kind of a crazy system, but it is what it is. And hey, if you end up disliking the video, if you have something you wanna criticize about the video, you feel like I'm wrong on certain aspects and you have some facts and some information to back yourself up, go down to the comment section and let me know. I do think this is an important conversation we continue to have about the way we criticize video games and the way we're trying to tell or hopefully have developers understand we want to be better about this video game industry instead of just grading on them, continually bashing them over stuff that we just can't comprehend because we don't need to comprehend it. Or maybe we can't say the wrong word. Don't comprehend, don't know about, just don't have the information in front of our fingertips. I don't know. But I'll catch you guys in the next one.