I think the problem has occurred far too often in the last 6-12 months to be dismissed as an infrequent occurrence, at least in the AAA space. Sony alone has released 5 games on PC in the last 6 months (Uncharted, Sackboy, Miles Morales, Returnal, TLOU). Four out of those five have had problems at launch with Spiderman being the only exception. Even outside that one publisher, it really feels like you hear about a lot of PC versions of games having problems at launch. From memory, I can recall hearing about problems with Plague Tale, Gotham Knights, Call of Duty, Callisto Protocol, Midnight Suns, Dead Space, Forspoken and Hogwarts. This is just from the last 6 months. I recall reading about stuttering problems in Elden Ring a year ago.
I think the severity of the problem seems diffused among the PC gamer population because of a variety of reasons. First, there's so many games releasing these days, including indies, that when you account for taste or even budgeting, it's unlikely that a single person will be able to play all of the ones that have problems. Second, due to quirks of various hardware configurations, it is entirely possible that you never experience a problem that is affecting a large number of people or maybe you just brute force through some of them. For me personally, I've never run into the shader stuttering problem because I've played only 2 out of all the games I listed in the previous paragraph - Hogwarts and Call of Duty. Hogwarts was flawless for me, but I do recall reading about how lots of people were having performance issues with it. I think I was just able to brute force through all of that because I have decent hardware. Call of Duty is a whole other story.
One cool thing about this iteration of Call of Duty is that the PC version has more settings options than I've ever seen in any game. In fact, it has so many options that they also implemented a search bar in the options menu just so you can easily find what you're looking for. They put a lot of effort into the PC version and it is truly appreciated. But all that effort is not enough if you don't finish it properly. Because the game was incredibly unstable at launch. There were so many performance and connection problems with cryptic error messages that you would go mad trying to play the game. There was also nothing you could do to fix it and it didn't matter how powerful or weak your hardware was. I can't tell you how many times my friends and I tried to play together and someone or the other would keep crashing non stop. Like, we could not reliably play a full 8 minute match without someone crashing to desktop. All that effort they put into adding 200 different settings options (compared to the 6 options that the PC port of Bioshock had in 2006) meant nothing when people couldn't play the game for 5 minutes at a time. The game eventually stabilized for us with patches and driver updates but there are still people who are experiencing different problems with the game even to this day.
The point I'm making is that I don't think we should accept the current state of affairs because of how much worse things used to be or could be. This is a software quality control problem. It's also not something that happens to the software. It's something the developers do. I understand all software is going to behave in weird ways and break when hundreds of thousands of people start using it. So you expect that you'll have to fix issues that pop up after release. But if you want to tell me that Iron Galaxy and Sony did not know that the game takes 30-60 minutes to compile shaders when you launch the game then I have a bridge to sell you. They were not blindsided by this. They knew. It's why they didn't give out PC review codes to anybody until right before launch. I think you should be super annoyed by how this company is treating you if you are a paying customer.
Why companies treat PC gamers like this is a whole other can of worms I'd rather not open right now. But you know they don't pull this kind of bullshit with the console versions of their games. One, because they make more money there, so they prioritize the Playstation version of any game. Second, because those platforms actually enforce quality standards and they would just not be able to release games there if they tried the nonsense they can get away with on PC. And there's nothing anyone can do about that because there will never be any entity enforcing quality standards on PC. And lastly, because gamers are quite possibly the least discerning consumers around.
www.humblebundle.com
videocardz.com
