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Comment by cqqxo4zV46cp | Hacker News Reader

My layperson’s opinion is that anything to do with gaming is particularly riddled with people that interact poorly with maintainers. Again, purely my opinion: gamer culture invites a particular sort of Dunning-Kruger-prone ‘power user’ type. Every gamer community carries with it a corpus of baseless, fictitious, technical information. “The developers didn’t do this because x”, “it’s ridiculous that they didn’t just y”, “They just aren’t listening to users!”

I’m not much of a gamer at all. But the once in a blue moon where I dip my toes in, it’s not that long before I’m met with a forum post or reddit comment making some technical assertion that sounds incredibly presumptuous if not downright incredibly unlikely.

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You need to look no further than what was happening on the xz commit threads post disclosure; there were multiple people preaching as to how to do "real" software development.

My favorite know-nothing gamer meme these days is "bad optimization". What they mean is that the performance is worse than what they would expect (?) on a given hardware configuration and game settings.

They haven't poked around with RenderDoc, they don't have the debug symbols to profile the CPU code, they have zero idea what kind of work the software needs to do, they simply know the lazy devs have failed to "optimize" their game.

You say this as if any game is actually as optimized as it could be which if you know anything about game development is an absurd assertion. Games are throwaway software programmed under strict deadlines. "Good enough" is the natural result of that. And yes, I have traced games' GPU and library usage due to bugs and performance issues. It's never a question if performance could be introduced but always just a question of how much effort/time it would take.

Games are meant to be accessible to the public (in order to make the most money) - as in, easy to obtain, install, configure, and use. When you interact with the public, you're going to get all kinds of people. Even the crazy awful ones.

As for reddit and forum posts? The people willing to make an account to just to complain online are the most motivated of the negative people.

I think what you said is true but the major reason is simpler: there are way more gamers than developers.

So if your project's audience is gamers, of course it's going to attract more people which also means lower quality community almost automatically.

The gamers seem to have particularly short fuses. It's like they skipped the socialisation phase of childhood development.

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