[SeasonalEnnui]

I could argue the opposite - GC makes it more viable for games. "GC is bad" misses too much nuance. It goes like this: developer very quickly and productively gets minimum viable game going using naive C# code. Management and investors are happy with speed of progress. Developers see frame rate stutters, they learn about hot path profiling, gen0/1/2/3 GC & how to keep GC extremely fast, stackalloc, array pooling, Span<T>, native alloc; progressively enhancing quickly until there are no problems. These advanced concepts are quick and low risk to use, and in the case of many of the advanced concepts; what you would be doing in other languages anyway.

[DeathArrow]

The only reason we might see FPS drop in games, is not because C# and its GC. It's mostly because the poor usage of the graphics pipeline and the lack of optimization. As a former game developer I had to do a lot of optimization so our games run nicely on mobile phones with modest hardware.

C# it's plenty fast for game programming.

[mycocola]

That entirely depends on the game. Recent example is Risk of Rain 2, which had frequent hitches caused by the C# garbage collector. Someone made a mod to fix this by delaying the garbage collection until the next load-screen — in other words, controlled memory leakage.

The developers of Risk of Rain 2 were undoubtedly aware of the hitches, but it interfered with their vision of the game, and affected users were left with a degraded experience.

It's worth mentioning that when game developers scope of the features of their game, available tech informs the feature-set. Faster languages thus enable a wider feature-set.

[SeasonalEnnui]

A good datapoint, thanks. Extending my original point - C# got really good in the last 5 years with regards to performance & low-level features. There might be an entrenched opinion problem to overcome here.

[bluGill]

Anybody writing a game should be writing in a game engine. There are too many things you want in a game that just come "free" from an engine that you will spend years writing by hand.

GC can work or not when writing a game engine. However everybody who writes a significant graphical game engine in a GC language learns how to fight the garbage collector - at the very least delaying GC until between frames. Often they treat the game like safety critical: preallocate all buffers so that there is no garbage in the first place (or perhaps minimal garbage). Without garbage collection might technically use more CPU cycles, but in general they are spread out more over time and so more consistent.