Mibu no ookami
Banned
We have absolutely no data on piracy. It's basically impossible to count the money lost due to it, so I have no idea why you bring this up.
It's hard to quantify the damage that piracy does, so it's not really a problem? Hilarious.
Your point is that publishers make the smartest financial decisions? Yeah, I can't agree with you there. Jedi Survivor for instance had major issues on Steam and years after launch, the game was still plagued by performance issues. Wouldn't it have been smarter to invest in the proper QA to ensure it launched properly? Same for Cyberpunk that got delisted and lost millions because again, they rushed the game. You're postulating that they all take the best avenues to maximize profits and that's untrue.
No one is saying publishers are infallible, but if there was tangible evidence that putting out a more perfect port resulted in more day 1 sales, I'm sure more publishers would insist on it.
And FF XVI sucks on PlayStation too. Most games outside of UE5 are adequate on PC. Are they perfect? Far form that, but the argument I'm making is that they don't need to invest millions into optimizing them to get console-like efficiency. All they have to do is get rid of the stutters in UE5 games and you would barely hear about bad PC ports anymore.
But we're not talking about PS5, we're talking about PS5 Pro here and it seems like PS5 Pro is going to be better suited to run UE5 games than PC for quite some time. You think PC porting is more simple than it is. And if you actually read reviews on steam you would see people complain about games crashing, not loading, audio bugging out, bad KBM mapping, performance, MTX, lack of wide screen support, and a multitude of other things not related to stutter. In fact, I've rarely seen bad steam reviews due to stutter.
Someone doesn't know what a strawman is. You're proving my point. Here is what you said earlier:
As if stuttering was just one of many issues. The reality is that it is THE NUMBER 1 issue. Then you ask me to list UE5 games that don't have stuttering which was my point...stuttering on UE5 games is the major problem. Outside of that, most games on PC are fine. This leads back to my argument that devs not investing into PC because it isn't worth it doesn't make sense. Investing the money into not having stutterfests on PC wouldn't cost them millions of dollars, so why are we talking about piracy or PC games being cheaper as if those were the cause for devs not putting the money to have games that don't stutter? It doesn't cost that much to have the QA and engineering for stutter-free experiences.
I don't think it is the #1 issue on PC. Maybe it's the most common, but it isn't the most complained about.
Which is offset by the fact that they were a team of 4 dudes.
Did they? Because again, that's a tiny team and a lot of their time was spent porting the game to DX12 from scratch, something multiplat devs don't have to deal with. Not to mention that multiplat devs start development for the PC build very early on. They don't wait until the last 2 years and assign four guys and tell them go to work. If anything, the GOWR example proves that with proper care, a relatively small team can get rid of this problem. I also like how you conveniently ignored Hellblade 2, but I guess this wouldn't help your cause, would it?
Who said they started after the game finished? That's just the maximum amount of time they would have had and you have no idea how much santa monica helped them. If it was so easy, this wouldn't be a prevalent issue.
Get rid of UE stutters. 90% of the bad PC ports suddenly disappear. Get rid of all stutters? Probably 95% of your bad ports are not bad anymore.
This is a flat out lie.