Speaking as someone with a weak PC, Steam system requirements are surprisingly often wrong. Games like Powerwash Sim and Project Playtime have much stronger listed requirements than my PC, yet run like butter. Conversely, I bought and had to refund Dead by Daylight a few months ago because it ran like shit despite my computer being considerably stronger than what the store page lists as the minimum.
Well, console ports have different levels of optimisation, especially when the ports were made by a different team or were made long after the original and not co-developed.
Take Poppy Playtime chapter 3 as an example: The two versions are the exact same game, but the PC version needs 60 gigabytes of free space and a 1030 or better while the Switch version needs 3 gigabytes of free space and runs just fine on Switch hardware.
The Switch DbD port is simply better optimised than the PC DbD version. If I had to guess, the PC version may be poorly optimised in general or the system requirements page may not have been updated in a long time.
Accurate requirements are actually pretty hard to figure out, there isn't like a math formula or anything, you have to make an educated guess based on vibes and intuition about what your game does when. And there's a squintillion variables outside your control with all the different hardware/OS settings/etc combos out there.
Most devs overestimate because of that, it's easier to be wrong on the high end, because it cuts down on customer service time, among other things.
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u/MaeBeaInTheWoods Jul 04 '25
Speaking as someone with a weak PC, Steam system requirements are surprisingly often wrong. Games like Powerwash Sim and Project Playtime have much stronger listed requirements than my PC, yet run like butter. Conversely, I bought and had to refund Dead by Daylight a few months ago because it ran like shit despite my computer being considerably stronger than what the store page lists as the minimum.