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Comment by exfascist | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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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