Game Programmers' Exclusive Pain Club

Billion-dollar GPU vs. one efficient Japanese coder? Not even a contest. While we're all chasing fancy hardware to run our bloated, framework-heavy code, Japanese game devs are out here making masterpieces run on calculators. Monster Hunter and Elden Ring weren't built with 16 layers of abstraction and 800MB of node_modules. The rest of us are like "I need a quantum computer to center this div" while they're squeezing every last cycle from hardware like it's still the PS2 era. Efficiency is apparently a lost art everywhere except Japan.

The one-person army known as "indie game developer" in their natural habitat. While AAA studios have entire departments for each role, indie devs are sitting there with name tags for Producer, Director, Actor, Editor, Writer, and Creative... because that's just Tuesday morning before coffee. The other 37 job titles didn't fit on the table. Budget? What budget? Sleep schedule? Never heard of her. But hey, at least no one can reject your pull requests when you're the entire git history.

The eternal RGB hardware divide: hardcore gamers who've spent hours troubleshooting driver conflicts and BIOS issues just to make their fancy lights work properly, versus the sweet summer children who just think "ooh, rainbow computer." Every time I see a new RGB component hit the market, I can feel my blood pressure rising. Sure, they look nice in product photos, but nobody mentions the proprietary software that'll crash your system, the incompatibilities between brands, or how they'll randomly reset to default rainbow puke during important presentations. Yet here I am, still buying them. Maybe I'm the real clown.

Valve Corporation, masters of creating legendary games but allergic to the number 3. They've given us Portal 1, Portal 2... then nothing. Half-Life, Half-Life 2... then radio silence for decades. Meanwhile, they're busy pumping out gaming hardware like Steam Deck and VR headsets with the sad stick figure muttering "i guess we make Hardware" instead of finishing what they started. The ultimate software development strategy: when you can't figure out how to count to 3, just pivot to hardware! Gabe Newell probably has a phobia of trilogies stronger than most developers' fear of touching legacy code.

The great FPS divide - where one group has a complete meltdown if their game drops below 100 frames per second, while the other group just silently endures slideshow-level performance like battle-hardened veterans. Remember coding on those ancient machines where compiling took so long you could brew coffee, drink it, and still have time for existential dread? That's the 30 FPS crowd - they've seen things, man. Meanwhile, the 100+ FPS folks are like those junior devs who complain when npm install takes more than 10 seconds.

THE ABSOLUTE AUDACITY of hardware questions in 2023! 💅 Is 12GB VRAM a lot? Well DARLING, for your precious little Fortnite sessions? It's like bringing a nuclear warhead to a water balloon fight. But for training your fancy Large Language Model? That's like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a sippy cup! PATHETIC! The way AI developers sob uncontrollably when someone suggests training a decent model on consumer hardware is just *chef's kiss* DRAMATIC. Meanwhile, gamers are over there with their RGB everything, treating 12GB like it's barely adequate for their precious ray-traced puddles.