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Comment by bastardoperator | Hacker News Reader

How do you feel about video games that range hundreds of gigabytes?

Games with hundreds of GB are using high poly models and high res textures. The actual code segment of the game is much much less. This isn’t really the same.

Games at that size are not clocking in because of their models and textures. It's from use of lossless, uncompressed audio files, and shipping multiple language files.

The issue is most common on games that release on consoles, but also for ones that want to support older hardware: the audio formats they use are designed to minimize the amount of decompression necessary for play, and so reduce resource requirements in exchange for storage space.

i’ve not yet seen a sound sample above a few 100mb, uncompressed. however it’s quite common to see a source model, or even a cooked down version, can absolutely be above 1gb. sound, except soundtracks (mostly), are also reused whereas models are not usually. couple that with one of your reasons, supporting all possible resolutions (PC games are the big offender here), and i don’t see sound being a huge issue. you can also compress sound while in transit, textures will only compress so much. wavs/PCM compress quite well

I don't play video games, so I have no opinion of them. I actually do play Kerbal Space Program, though I think that it is a few hundred megabytes, certainly not even a single gigabyte.

1.9 GB on disk not including expansions.

https://www.gog.com/game/kerbal_space_program

In that case, I feel that I'm getting a decent experience for the size.

Would you argue the same for a 60 MB Hello, World application?

Depends, if someone presented a hello world example in unreal engine I would expect the binary to be larger than 60MB.

Fair point.

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