Porter's World

Who should bend?

If you’re a flash game developer I’m sure you’ve encountered what has got to be one of the most nagging things a flash game came do to it’s creator, or player for that matter. This nagging I speak of is lag, slow fps (frames per second) that makes a game look and run horrid. It runs fine on your computer, it looked great locally on your machine, but once it got tossed up on the web it all fell apart. This has always lingered a question within my head as I yelled back at the reviews out loud in my living room, who should bend, the developer, or the person playing your game receiving lag?

Like all arguments we have two sides to this, the first being that some people out there just need to learn when their computers are out of date. There was once a time when 512MB of ram was acceptable and got you by just fine, we also had phones that still used cords back then too, and we could only talk on them in the house. Once I became a member of the tech world, I’ve always tried to keep up enough to have my computer run the newest games on at least medium settings. I currently have an AMD duel 5600, 2 gigs of corsair RAM and a 9600 GT which was on sale for under $100 bucks. That’s a pretty good computer, and it will run any flash game perfectly fine. I often used to forget that my computer was once far above average (although still not that expensive, people just need to stop ripping themselves off at best buy and learn to put a computer together, it’s like Legos with a bit of research). This lead me to a huge discouragement when a few games of mine just didn’t play nearly as well as they should have due to frame rate issues. At the time I was highly convinced that all of the users complaining should just upgrade their computers because they were old and going on worthless.

The other side of the argument, as much as many of you will hate to admit, is the more logical side of the two. Despite the rage that some developers may have for people with lagging issues in what seems to be a perfectly running game, it’s really us the developers who should be catering to those users. No matter how bad some users computers may be, they’re another player out there, and as a developer our job is to please as many users as possible. More users equals more views, more views equals more cash from ads and happier sponsors, happy sponsors equals more business in the future. This also eliminates a lot of low votes due to people thinking the game is horrid because it’s literally unplayable, or just so slow it looks like it was made by an amateur. Having a high rating on some of the bigger sites can go a very long way, so it’s especially important to cater to those users who may drop a zero vote due to a poor playing experience.

With these few facts alone it’s rather obvious to see the damage that can be done due to a handful of users having frame rate issues. I don’t like a user complaining about the game running slow and dropping a zero vote on Newgrounds any more than any other developer, but the truth is we need to cater to those users or suffer the consequences. Perhaps one day when I’m rich from flash games I’ll buy all those users a new computer built from scratch, until then I’ll just have to optimize my games and be sure to test them on multiple machines of multiple performance.