The price of game hardware is absolutely affecting game dev. The vast majority of games are developed with target performance bands in mind:
- High end, where the game is performant with all of the bells and whistles turned on
- Mid-spec, where the game is performant with default settings
- Low end, where the game is only performant when most settings are turned down
This also includes game consoles which are usually tuned for mid-spec (the PS5 Pro or Xbox Series X, would be closer to high end).
Part of planning for our target performance bands is understanding what we expect players to own. We know that ram and GPUs are really expensive! We know that it is pricing out a lot of players. Aside from our own feelings as gamers on the matter, this also affects our potential customer base because there just aren't that many people with the money to buy the higher end machines to play our game. This means that we adjust the band downward so that our game is playable across the performance band that covers the majority of the players who want to play our game.
In short - yes, we care a lot and we are adjusting game performance to do our best to match the kind of game performance we think most of our players have. We want as many people to play our games as we can get.
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