Why are game file sizes so stupidly huge now?

Tomous wrote:
Death's Head wrote:
OrangeRakoon wrote:
Death's Head wrote:By contrast, I just downloaded Cuphead on the PC last night and it was only 1.9GB, making my first thought, "this can't be very good".

I don't understand why you'd think that
Just seems very small for a current gen game.

Well Super Mario Odyssey is only 5.7GB and that's one of the best games of the year...

That is still 3 times the size and given it runs on lesser hardware, there is probably an expectation of smaller game sizes.

I just don't associate file size with quality - and if anything I am more likely to buy a digital game that has a smaller download. Of course it depends on the type of game. Cuphead is obviously small because it's a 2D game.

Linking file size to quality is like thinking a film that’s four hours long has to be better than a film that’s two hours long.

Batman v Superman shows that isn’t the case.

Isn't fast racing neo like 100mb because textures are procedurally generated.

That might have been the case when games came on 20 floppy disks as to the amount of content.

The irony is, those to pirate and repack the games do so at a huge compression ratio. The only downside from what i've seen (i buy a lot and pirate gooseberry fool games) is the install time is about 1 - 2 hours (on a high end machine). Decompressing takes time, i imagine speaking as an engineer, it's easier to just slap all the gooseberry fool on the bbq without doing much more work ( = money), and let the end user deal with the size.

especially as most people dont give a gooseberry fool about the large download size, they just go hmm thats big and move on.

Compression would add confusion anyway, if a game says it's 10GB to download I as a user expect it to take up 10GB on my HDD.

OrangeRakoon wrote:Compression would add confusion anyway, if a game says it's 10GB to download I as a user expect it to take up 10GB on my HDD.

"10GB download, 40GB on HDD".

I'll take my £100k consultancy fee now please.

Karl wrote:
OrangeRakoon wrote:Compression would add confusion anyway, if a game says it's 10GB to download I as a user expect it to take up 10GB on my HDD.

"10GB download, 40GB on HDD".

I'll take my £100k consultancy fee now please.

It's in the post

I compressed it down to 10p to make it easier to send though, you can uncompress it to the original £100k size by putting it in your bank. This may take some time.

You can (edit) decompress to RAM only (i think), so small file size stays same on HD. Difficult coding and long loading times probably.

Stardew Valley was a 175mb download on PS4. File size is definitely not an indicator of quality.

Why are game file sizes so stupidly huge now?

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