I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup …

Honestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself. The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to. ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.

I believe it's mostly due to a global change at the lower levels. It seems similar to google never ending beta (every month basic apps change in layout, color, UX.. it's surprisingly exhausting, even when there's a good idea, which is rare, it's flooded by a bag of mistakes). The constant update model with broadband/fiber access means changing things cost zero, no cost => no pressure to provide something of high quality. Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.

I am a big fan of Firaxis games, but they have been releasing buggy games for a long time, so nothing really new for them.

> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. Agree that is a factor, but a small one. > It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart. Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software) The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives. 1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice. 2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some…

It's probably not going to be a popular counterpoint, but for instance, Microsoft has used 365 subscription fees to accelerate the development of Office and in my estimation it is actually getting better over time. I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.

I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots. That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.

> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards Crashes, connectivity issues, and desyncing are as old as PC computer gaming, and they were all much worse in the past.

I think there's a much simpler/happier issue in play - MBAs. Games from big studios are increasingly being directed and driven by people who have zero interest in games and just view it as a means to revenue. So games are being rushed out the door prematurely in an unimaginably buggy state, development rushed such that repairing the mess created (after launch of course) is an endless series of half-working duct tape and shoe strings, designed to coerce endless DLC purchases, and more. And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent. This is dri…