The Hype Cycle Continues

OMG, the absolute TRAGEDY of Linux gaming in one brutal image! 💀 Game companies will enthusiastically raise their hands when asked about supporting Linux servers (free money, honey!), but the SECOND someone mentions actually doing the work to make anti-cheat compatible with Linux desktops? *crickets* The deafening silence is SENDING ME! These multi-billion dollar companies acting like enabling a compiler flag is equivalent to solving quantum physics. THE DRAMA! THE AUDACITY! Meanwhile, Linux gamers are just sitting there with perfectly good hardware, begging for crumbs of compatibility. I can't even!

The indie game dev lifecycle in a nutshell: Five glorious years of success followed by eternal obscurity. Just like Herman Melville who went from celebrated author to "who?" faster than you can say "white whale." Your first game is Flappy Bird , your second is Flappy Bird: The Sequel Nobody Asked For . The Wikipedia timeline of your career will be equally savage—a brief moment of glory followed by the crushing section heading: "2023-2028: Unsuccessful developer who now works at Starbucks."

Ah yes, the classic "just code it in Assembly" solution! Because nothing says "I'm desperate for performance" like abandoning all modern conveniences and diving straight into the metal. FPS dropping in your RollerCoaster Tycoon clone? Forget optimizing your existing code! Just rewrite the entire thing in Assembly with zero libraries, no engine, no team support—just you and 500,000 lines of raw machine instructions. Who needs sleep or sanity when you can manually manage every register and memory address? The irony is that some legendary games like RollerCoaster Tycoon were actually written mostly in Assembly by programming wizards. But those people weren't normal humans—they were coding deities who probably dreamed in opcodes.

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 we had to optimize code to run on 2MB of RAM? Now we're out here with 16GB machines running Electron apps that somehow still manage to lag. The PS5 and Xbox Series X sitting smugly next to our gaming rigs while ancient consoles like the SNES and original PlayStation got by with kilobytes. Those old-school devs were literal wizards—squeezing Doom into memory smaller than a modern email attachment. Meanwhile, I'm over here watching Chrome devour RAM like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The four-panel comic perfectly encapsulates the special hell of GPU driver updates. First panel: developer hates themselves after a bug-filled day. Second panel: bigger figure comforts them. Third panel: AMD/NVIDIA drops their "latest drivers" that break everything. Fourth panel: developer discovers they now hate the drivers more than themselves. Nothing quite like spending weeks debugging your code only to realize it was the driver update all along. At least your self-loathing has a new target.