If people say a game is poorly optimized, what do they mean? And how do you “optimize” a game?

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Edit: Really enjoy threads like this, because you learn and see so many Pov.

My favourite answer (not in this thread unfortunately) was:

*”If you write a story, the number of words you use can affect the reader’s experience.*

*Use too many words, and the reader takes a long time to get through the book, has difficulty remembering everything, and can’t separate what’s important and what’s not.*

*But use too few words and the reader will get an incomplete picture, make mistakes in understanding the story, and eventually become disinvested in the book.*

*A poorly optimized game is like one of these examples. Either too much goes in, making it difficult for the hardware to cope, or not enough goes in, making the game buggy and broken. (Sometimes both, but that’s beyond ELI5).*

*When it comes to optimising a reader’s experience, it is not about putting more or less words in but choosing the right combination of the right words at the correct time in the plot. Optimising a game is similar concept.*

*Most importantly, no matter how well you write a book, there are always people who will think it could’ve been written better, especially by them. “*

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There is a gazillion shortcuts in game development that you can take to make different parts of the game perform better without losing much quality. But this require a significant amount of time and skill investment.

Games these days are released full of bugs and with little optimization because studios and publishers want to make money asap, rush development and some even release unfinished games.

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