Reading The Fine Print Before Execution

The eternal struggle of indie game devs on Reddit: First panel, they post "SUPPORT INDIE DEVELOPERS" with noble intentions. Second panel, they follow up with "MY GAME IS WISHLIST IF IT APPEALS TO YOU!" - a perfectly reasonable request. Third and fourth panels? The same person who was just preaching about supporting indies is now glaring with the fury of a thousand compiler errors. The cognitive dissonance of wanting indie games to succeed... unless they're being promoted in their Reddit feed. It's like saying "I love open source" but then blocking all GitHub notification emails.

Meta spent $13 billion on their "Horizon" metaverse and all they got was avatars that look like they were rendered on a potato. "Legs are coming soon!" is the kind of feature announcement you'd expect from a game in 2003, not something that cost twice Electronic Arts' annual revenue. At this rate, Mark's going to need another $50 billion just to add eyebrows that don't look haunted. Meanwhile, The Sims 3 from 2009 is over here with fully functioning humans that can already woohoo in hot tubs.

The eternal struggle of 3D artists who create beautiful models with shader complexity that would make a GPU weep. While they blissfully ignore the optimization viewport (notice that "Shader Complexity" tab up top), anyone who dares look at the profiler has an existential crisis. That MaxShaderComplexityCount=2000 at the bottom is basically screaming "your beautiful art is killing the framerate, you monster." It's like putting 47 Instagram filters on your selfie and wondering why your phone is hot enough to cook an egg.

Remember when game devs hand-crafted assembly code to squeeze every cycle out of the PS2? Now they just throw more lights at the problem and hope DLSS will save them. Modern devs staring at their RTX 5090 wondering why their unoptimized mess runs like a slideshow. "But I added ray-tracing!" Yeah, and your grass simulation is calculating the aerodynamics of each individual blade. Maybe learn to write a shader that doesn't require NASA's computing budget.

The ultimate crossover nobody expected: payment processors vs. gamers. This meme references how Visa and Mastercard have occasionally blocked payments to certain gaming platforms or content creators, citing "policy violations" that often leave both users and developers scratching their heads. It's the digital equivalent of having your mom call the arcade and demand they stop taking your quarters. Except now you're 35 with a mortgage and still can't buy that DLC because some executive in a boardroom decided your game was "problematic." The "Gooners vs Gamers" labels perfectly capture that moment when casual players transform into payment rights activists after their transaction gets declined. Nothing unites the internet faster than payment processing drama.

The financial paradox of gaming platforms! Credit cards reject legitimate game purchases on Steam/itch.io but somehow approve microtransactions for little Timmy's 17th Robux purchase this week. Parents discover the horror when their kid has spent $500 on virtual hats while their own purchase of Vampire Survivors for $4.99 gets flagged as "suspicious activity." The banking algorithm's priorities are clearly... optimized for chaos .