During the Game Developers Conference, one of the most discussed topics was the need to urgently return to strict game optimization.
In recent years, especially when porting projects from consoles to PC, the industry has become accustomed to a different approach. Games often required 32 GB of RAM and powerful video cards with a large amount of VRAM. This made it possible to hide code problems, memory leaks, or poor texture compression. However, after a sharp increase in component prices, developers admitted that many players simply would not be able to constantly upgrade their computers.
Discussions at GDC show a general conclusion: studios should be more careful about the resources of users' equipment. Developers recognize that they can no longer count on an unlimited amount of fast memory from the audience. Instead, companies are investing in new memory management tools, smarter resource loading, and aggressive data compression so that games run stably on mid-range PCs.
For players, this technological crisis may be a plus. If the industry really returns to serious optimization, new games will work more stably immediately after release, and the era of projects that turned into a "slide show" on most PCs at the start may end.