I am not condoning piracy, but when looking at game sizes, go check out fitgirl repacks. Right now there is a Steam game there reduced from 20GB to 10GB. Another is reduced from 3.5GB to 1.1GB. The downloads from there are consistently and significantly reduced.
If a pirate can do that, why not a game company? or Steam?
Why should I have to download gigs of languages I will never use? Just give me the language option at the time of download?
That of course makes for more work for the game companies.
All that data represents visual fidelity. I don’t want the of type games that boast amazing graphics and endless content to get smaller and more crude.
I think this product is actually a big dead end because all you need is fast Internet to make this whole thing obsolete.
Storage is also stupidly cheap even for blazing fast SSDs, for the price of a typical AAA title you can get a 2TB pcie nvme tlc SSD.
I also see cable companies like Xfinity offering speeds above 1Gbps over plain copper. They’re selling speeds that consumer WiFi can’t even handle. Even the laziest monopoly cable companies have rolled out new docsis versions at minimal cost that deliver really impressive speeds on their ancient copper networks.
If you saturate WiFi 6 at 600mbps a 100GB download is only going to take around 30 minutes if not less.
Leftover assets that weren't properly cleaned before shipping the build?
Uncompressed media that could be? (I recall that even well into the 2000s games often came with basically uncompressed CD audio tracks)
(I think the uncompressed audio was usually because of CPU decoding restraints, and the fact that a typical PlayStation game had such a crazy amount of “free” storage to work with on a disc compared to the amount of data needed to create the game and its world - might as well toss in voice acting and FMV video)
As someone who bought such an SSD, I'm surprised that AAA titles cost more than 100€ nowadays.
Also stupidly difficult when you have a preconfigured device such as a laptop. I think anything that would require you to modify your equipment's hardware configuration is not much of an argument.