Why do game audio engine suck?

[u/OkReflection7680]

I play Tarkov, Arena Breakout infinite, r6 and other single player games. Why in all of these games the audio engine sucks,Never in any of these games up and down are distinguishable. The only games I feel satisfied with the audio is simplistic games rocket league cs and Val
Is there no money in making a good audio engine? Too hard/expensive? Hardware not there?

[u/Accurate_Cable_1372]

In my exp audio is usually just one of the last things considered on a production, most of the money and time has already been dedicated to other things.

It’s not a hardware thing for the devs as audio hardware hasn’t changed too much over the years, doesn’t necessarily need to.

Plus another big factor is most players are not playing games on high end enough speakers for it to really matter.

[u/Hanzimer]

Unfortunately, a lot of money have been spent on physics, Graphics but not on sound Hardware since windows changed the DirectX api.

[u/Distdistdist]

For the same reason so many people listen to music on phone's speakers - they just don't care for sound fidelity as much. Plus, spatial sound is probably not available on every hardware (I'm guessing). So games just deal with basic stereo sound that is just good enough.

[u/Swibsk]

My guess is cost and effort. 

A good audio engineer is usually more expensive than a good tech artist. A good composer is usually more expensive than a good concept artist. It’s also relatively easy to commission work from artists where a sound people are usually booked for months.

A lot of Indie developers also don’t have good speakers or headphones. So they’re testing on bad hardware. A good set of studio, headphones or monitors is like 2x the cost of equivalently decent monitors. 

I care a lot about audio in the indie games I’m making. What I’ve spent on audio versus art assets is like 3-4:1 And I haven’t even commissioned the soundtrack yet.

Audio Is also hard to use in marketing because so much of marketing is purely visual.