Super Mario Odyssey file size

[Zekkyou]

Miyamotoo said:

Zekkyou said:

They don't have to, but they're heavily incentivized to. Larger files leads to more expensive cartridges for Nintendo, and their consumers spending more money on stuff that doesn't benefit Nintendo themselves (and for those with less money that expense will also often mean less game purchases in general). 

Fortunately for Nintendo many of their games are already fairly well suited to small files. They're often technically reserved, have few custscenes, less audio files, and have to deal with smaller asset files than a PS4/X1 title. Add in some relatively aggressive compression (since the financial upsides is worth the technical downsides for them) and you end up with a fairly small file.

Offcourse, but look also on size of Wii U games, SM3DW is 1.7GB on Wii U disk, they relly didnt need to make so small size on disk.

-snip-

There were indeed less incentives on the WiiU, but as i said it's what they make that gives the an edge here. When Nintendo makes games more in line with the technical practises of other developers their games inflates in a similar fashion (e.g. XCX, and to a lesser extent BotW).

We can still praise them for their small files, it just gets tiring seeing people repeatedly conflates file size with skill. The latter is relevant when the former is a priority, but likewise a large file can be an active choice (less compression presents its own advantages), or an unavoidable consequence of what's being made. It's as annoying as when people conflate small files with a game having little content.