where was the job well done?

There is nothing more frustrating than a game full of bugs, but even worse is a title that does not work well due to lack of optimization and that you know does not have performance problems in a box of 300 euros that is almost ten years old. And worst of all, it seems that computer game users are completely sold out to the wrongdoing of many development studios.

The problem of bugs in PC games is problematic

It must be taken into account that the more complex a video game is, the more failures will end up occurring due to its emergence, which has to do with the interaction of the different elements of the game with each other. Many of the bugs that you see in many games are the product of that and especially due to a very short period of quality control or for not having invested in what is usually called QA, what’s more, whoever writes this could talk about horror stories of code so badly written where parts of the code that should consume, let’s put a number, 100 in resources take a million of these.

On consoles, independent publishers or third parties send the games to the console manufacturer and license them, and if SONY, Nintendo or Microsoft see that something is not working well or quality levels are not reached, the game simply does not come out. The last time this happened we had the Cyberpunk 2077 controversy and we already saw what happened. What is the problem on PC? Well, we don’t have any of that as we are no man’s land, hence we see a large amount of garbage that is not only badly optimized, but also full of bugs and nobody takes responsibility for it when it happens and it is extremely negative for the platform.

The last straw that broke the camel’s back was SONY’s poorly intentional conversion of its Last of Us so that users get desperate and buy a PS5 instead of upgrading the PC. The reality is that if someone released a game with those conditions on their console, they would reserve the right to veto the release.

On PC there should be hardware profiles for games

Currently it is possible to make a game for Xbox Series and PC and for both versions to have almost the same code. Of course, if we leave aside things like the shaders already compiled for RDNA 2 on both consoles and reference to specific units that are not found on the computers. Usually, 98% of the source code and 99.9% of the material in a game for the Microsoft console is the same.

However, one of the things that makes developing on Xbox easier than developing on PC is profiles. Although both Series S and Series X are closed hardware, the era in which programming almost to metal no longer exists and is rather part of the past and what is done is developed taking into account hardware profiles.

And what do we mean by that? Well, to the fact of creating different hardware specifications as a scale on which the games have to be programmed at different resolutions and graphic qualities. Let the end user know, at least if their PC meets those requirements, they will be able to play the game in a number of conditions without worrying about performance.

How would it work?

Very simple, through a benchmark included in DirectX you will be able to test your PC to find out if it meets the requirements to run games in the different profiles, which will be renewed every two years, with the launch of the new generations of graphics cards. In this way, hardware rotations would be fully controlled and dissatisfaction due to poorly made games would be reduced.

Is it possible to do it with a huge variety of hardware? Well yes, making each component have an internal score that only hardware manufacturers and Microsoft itself would know, not game developers. The idea would be to ensure that the game will work and therefore be optimized.

This in turn would force the creation of a certification committee among the developers to ensure that the game would work on all PCs that meet that profile and not only well optimized, but with as few bugs as possible.