It's because shitting on game devs is the trendy thing these days, even among more technically inclined crowds unfortunately. It seems like there's a general unwillingness to accept that game development is hard and you can't just wave the magic "optimize" wand at everything when your large project is also a world of edge cases. But it seems like it should be that simple according to all the armchair game devs on the internet.
The level of work that goes into even “small” games is pretty incredible. When I was a grad student another student was doing their (thesis based, research focused) masters while working at EA on a streetfighter(?) game.
The game programming was actually just as research focused and involved as the actual research. They were trying to figure out how to get the lowest latency and consistency for impact sounds.
the engineers disease: "i'm smarter than you and I need to prove it, and we're so smart we wouldn't have shipped this code in the first place" bla bla bla
also keep in mind that modern gaming generates more revenue than the movie industry, so it's in the interests of several different parties to denigrate or undermine any competing achievement -- "Bots Rule Every Thing Around Me"
For me it's not so much about shitting on game devs as it is about shitting on the ogres that run game companies. Any of us who have done development should understand we have little control over scope and often want to do more than the business allows us to.
That is completely ok in my opinion. It's just most discourse I come across treats the developers as complete amateurs who don't know what they're doing. As someone who's a professional dev myself I just can't get behind bashing the people doing the actual work when I know we're all dealing with the same business realities, regardless of industry.
Meh, the same is true for almost every discussion on the internet, everyone is an expert armchair for whatever subject you come across, and when you ask them about their experience it boils down to "I read lots of Wikipedia articles".
I mean I agree with you, that it is trendy and seemingly easy, to shit on other people's work, and at this point it seems to be a challenge people take up upon themselves, to criticise something in the most flowery and graphic way as possible, hoping to score those sweet internet points.
Since maybe 6-7 years I stopped reading reviews and opinions about newly launched games completely, the internet audience (and reviewers) are just so far off base compared to my own perspective and experience that it have become less than useless, it's just noise at this point.
I wish many people's "expertise" atleast amounted to reading wikipedia. It seems for many that is too much and they either make crap up on the spot or latch onto whatever the first thing they find that will confirm their biases regardless of how true it is.
There has long been a trend that "software engineers" and "computer scientists" both have been rather uninterested in learning the strategies that gaming developers use.
Really, the different factions in software development are a fascinating topic to explore. Add embedded to the discussion, and you could probably start fights in ways that flat out don't make sense.
