Build dependencies. You need to do X in your application. Play a sound, for example. So you look for a library, already written, that does that for you. You include that into your product. That library depends on five other libraries. Each of those depends on two or three more. And when you build your project, you're not excluding all the routines you're not using; you're just leaving them all in there. See it all that time, everywhere.

The thinking is probably along the lines of Wyatt Cheng goof 2018 Blizzcon. Here's how I reinterpret it to this continual install size inflation "The current plan is to keep inflating Install sizes on all OS platforms, we do not have any plans at the moment, to compress our game files to conform your 2004 tier install size." *audience boos* "WhAT Don't You guys NoT HaVe 32TB drives?! their dirt cheap too."

While you do make some good points about how games were always "relatively" big compared to your average storage space at the time, it might also be important to remember that back in the day, you didn't necessarily even write all that data to your hard drive, often a lot of the data was just read off the CD as your were playing. These days however, physical media games don't even have anything on the discs anymore if you get a disc at all.

Exactly the question on my mind, though I expected all these answers. Not much we can say without seeing the process that went into this, other than speculate about the usual suspects of greedy publishers/developers, though given the relevant history of the Devs, very likely a mix of their inexperience and publisher greed.

I don't think I would mind so much if I could actually make use of the standard drive for my game storage. but on xbox only the proprietary SSD can store and run current gen games. So that $20 external hard drive is now useless because I cannot actually put games on it. because it is "too slow" And to add that we are now really seeing the consequences of not optimizing games (or game engines.) you end up with most of the current generation of frustration in a gameplay experience. Destiny and Destiny 2 are a couple of the worst optimized games and even the developers have voiced this frustration. taking hours to load map/level editors and that un-optimization leading to the "sunsetting" of content that was paid for. just because the game file is too large.

This video is longer than needed, and does not answer main question (but honestly skipped part of it) - why game that was small, now it's so bit without big improvment in graphics.

First off, nice vid- Ill throw ya a sub/like/bell. Gratz on getting picked up by the algo, you were in my home page recommended. 🤙 Because 99.999% of dev studios are factories, not stuidos. They don't care about the finished product. MONEY MONEY MONEY. Also, if the majority of the game installs through a launcher- a large portion of users outside of the US will run over their 2 hour playtime return period by simply installing the game with slow-ish internet, ez money. Mainstream games and steam releases are on the same level as google play store trash these days. These fuckers are lucky im somewhat mentally stable, this is unibomber-deserving levels of ineptitude. You did make a few valid points, though. I remember a few PS1 games that were about 100mb themselves, with 400mb of various language data and voice dubs.

The best approach to this would be to offer 4k textures as an option. Gaming is at 1440p now. No need for those massive textures. Having a massive asset library is cool, but I'm sure it's a massive headache from a development standard. Also a better optimized compression methodology perhaps combined with AI could even further reduce file size.

The short answer: "Because they can". Understand that "optimization" takes time. Hours of dev time, it costs money. Tuning texture resolution/compression, vector count, arcane tampering with render settings. Sometimes you need to invent brand new tricks to deal with novel bottlenecks. And the goal isn't "make as optimal as possible", it's "make it as accessible as profitable". 99% of people can afford 70GB of storage. That remaining 1% they're going to miss in sales, isn't worth the cost of optimizing for them. Sure it's shit form. But it's business.

Because they can. Everybody has huge ass SSDs nowadays and compressing/optimiziing your product takes time, time that you have to pay people for, which is bad for your investor´s RoI. I worked with AI upscaling myself, it´s not like you just hit a button and it´s done. It´s faster yes, but not as fast as people think. Not yet anyway.

I bet its the in game shop