I wish more game developers optimized for space. I stopped playing video games almost altogether because I'm not going to download 70 GB every time I want to play something. The size has gotten absurd.
[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/ry2D/...
I don't think this is a fair comment. Theres an enormous tradeoff to make when compressing game assets, and uncompressed game assets are _absolutely enormous_. My current project has about 30 people at the moment. The game content is ~50GB, the client itself is ~4GB but the source substance files/fbx files/photogrammetry assets are tipping on 500GB. We're a _small_ AAA game. My previous project was closer to 500GB for the game content, and the source assets were multiple TB.
Tools like Oodle are third party licenses that need to be considered. Most games are compressing but switching to better compression methods can make the differences shown. Theres still huge tradeoffs to be made though. Most GPU formats for consoles require platform specific texture formats, and some of them don't compress well (hello dxt). You might have to trade a 20% file size reduction for a 30 second increase load time. Is that worth it? Maybe.
Either way, it's not just "dumb Devs". We care, we work hard on this.
I may have come too rough in my comments and lost the original intent. I was hoping to defend that devs _already have_ access to good compression tools and that they already use them, and 70gb games are that big after compression is applied. That's where my assumption started.
I understand well that there are custom formats for different platforms, and that the whole reason these tools exist is not to squeeze an extra 10% smaller files, but to get fast load times while maintaining small file sizes.
> My previous project was 500gb
That wouldn't surprise me to be honest. It makes perfect sense.
Edit: never mind. Saw this being discussed elsewhere in this thread.
And there are YT videos that call developers out for mushy textures on every new game release.
At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it?
At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.
The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.
Sometimes you got a really bad installer, and it could take a pretty grueling 2+ hours. Some companies chose to optimize for space (thus cost..) rather than user experience.
As space got more plentiful it would sometimes be easier to copy the disk and remount it and then install.
This is why some people love game streaming. Esp true if you only play a game once in a while.