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Comment by retSava | Hacker News Reader

It could be a form of "look, this file is X large for Y minutes, that's much more than Z, so it must be better!".

I have a rising suspicion that some game companies with fluid ethics do this - avoiding to optimize and strip unused content, in order to inflate game size.

"Wow, it's 102 GB, the game must be huge with boatloads of content!" (ie huge == higher chance of I'm getting my moneys worth). Which in turn becomes a problem with the latest generation consoles that have quite little drive space (Playstation ca 625 GB).

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> I have a rising suspicion that some game companies with fluid ethics do this

Occam's razor says that tooling, or developers, just aren't great at shaking unreferenced content from production builds.

I'm not a game developer, but its common to still ship unused code or css in websites, just because someone forgets to remove it, or its hard to tell if it's still used. I could only imagine this is more of a problem in more complicated game dev, especially when time to focus on non-functional requirements like that can be hard to come by.

> Occam's razor says that tooling, or developers, just aren't great at shaking unreferenced content from production builds.

The Cutting Room Floor[0] is an empirical proof of this assertion.

[0] https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor

Apparently they lose players when the game receives large updates, so I think this is a pain point for them as well.

https://www.pcgamer.com/call-of-duty-warzone-cant-have-more-...

I have a few apps built for macos which I sell on app store. I really like to keep app sizes small. Like if I would try to use a library and see that the app size blow up from 5MB to 50MB, I would not use it. So basically I don’t use any libraries and keep my apps in sizes of 3-5MB.

At the same time I saw some comments, reviews about my apps, that they are probably would not be good just because the app sizes are too small.

I can never understand why people leave reviews on apps they haven't downloaded.

The App Store hasn't allowed this for years; only someone who has downloaded or purchased the app can review it.

I used to work very hard to push game binary sizes down because it limits the ability for our customers to actually play the game if the patch sizes are too large (though, it must be noted a large part of the company is entirely apathetic to this), but nobody is inflating the sizes intentionally.

As much as people like to hate on consoles gamers, it's predominantly console "TRCs" which put limits on the size of games, that's the only time the company really cares about the sizes of games.

Download size is a "tragedy of the commons" situation. The overall size usually isn't owned by anyone and each contribution to increasing the size is usually small so monitoring it daily or weekly doesn't help. It is only when you are able to compare the size 1 month, 6 months, 12 months ago that a large jump can be observed - one accomplished by lots of tiny 0.1% increments.

But even if you do notice that and file bugs what team in their right mind would spend time trying to reduce their own component's size by 2% when they could spend that time on features or bug fixing instead? And if you asked the majority of their users would agree - "F'k the 20MB, fix bug XYZ/finally implement feature ABC".

Despite each individual decision along the way being arguably the correct decision the product still adds up to +30% every year.

"Never do any download size optimizations" is just as silly as "shave off 20MB at the expense of implementing a much-needed feature."

Usually there's some ultra low-hanging fruit that everyone knows about, and if download size has become an issue, a bit of time should absolutely be allocated to basic housekeeping tasks as long as the product is supported.

Almost nobody cares about the size, that's why its big - not so much a purposeful game - there's no extra money to be paid to bloat your own software, you'll do that fine on your own.

> quite little drive space

> 625 GB

When did I get so old?

I thought exactly the same question, I'm just happy that my eyes, brain and fingers work well enough that I can still type to the whippersnappers.

That's probably because of high quality assets being shipped with little to no compression to improve performance.

And asset duplication on older console generations. The consoles only had HDDs, and so to ensure a level's assets would stream from disk quick enough they packaged copies of all those assets together. So the exact same game can be smaller on PS5 than PS4 as the SSD makes fragmentation irrelevant.

Often the developers also forget to remove unused files and cut content, but I don't think this has a large effect on the game size.

>Wow, it's 102 GB, the game must be huge with boatloads of content!

Does anyone actually think this way? SNES games were some megabytes and often have more content than I can get through (I still haven't beaten the SNES zelda... maybe I should pick it back up.) Once you're in the Gigabyte range anything beyond is likely waste.

I would guess a lot of people, maybe more non technical people think that. Every console generation the file size of games gets bigger because of bigger textures, better models, etc. So it's easy to make the relation between huge file size and quality, which isn't always true. The difference between 5GB and 80GB should be noticeable, but now with 150GB games I don't think it's all content and more bad file optimization because it's cheaper this way and people don't (really) care.

I've always wondered.. Was a game like GTA5 80GB+ because it contained the audio for localized in-game speech for english/french/spanish/italian/etc.? Does this really happen? Aren't we at the point yet where the audio is only downloaded on demand for the localization of the PC unless opted-into later? Also. Don't need your textures for playing on an 8k monitor if I'm playing at 1440p.. unless I want them.

At least on Steam there is the _option_ for developers to publish individual depots for different locales, and a single game download can be made of multiple depots (so you could have a global base depot, and then put localised content in depots per locale). https://steamdb.info/sub/398272/depots/

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