

Nothing annoys me more as a AAA dev than weird, annoying armchair critic nerd-ass dweebs thinking we’re “lazy”. Okay, you try this shit, then. I have the UE5 editor open right now, and I’m busy squashing bugs and optimizing our game. I’ve been doing it for 18 hours a day for months, sometimes 7 days a week. This stuff is way harder than you think, even with the proper amount of time, money, staffing and expertise.
I can’t think of a single AAA game using UE5 that requires that level of performance due to its size and complexity and doesn’t use audio middleware, which by default compresses audio when generating soundbanks. I have no idea where this myth of “everyone uses uncompressed audio” came from, but it’s annoying and wrong most of the time, as most social media misinformation is. Maybe people think there’s real-time compression of audio at runtime in shipped games? Idk, because that’s just not how anything works; audio files are usually pre-compressed into a nearly lossless audio format before the game binaries are even compiled into a .exe for distribution, and there are usually unique compression settings per-area-of-your-game to further compress less-critical audio into the smallest filesize possible.
Source: literally generating Vorbis/WEM Opus files (for Playstation) in Wwise as I type this.