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caffeinade on 20 January 2018
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Pemalite said:
caffeinade said:

"they are forgetting about compression and optimization."
Come on.
Do you really think developers just, don't compress and / or don't "optimise".
There is only so much you can do when you have 100+ artists working with complex art pipelines.

He's not wrong.

A large portion of a games install size is thanks to Lossless Audio. - And a massive chunk of that is due to localization. I.E. Including extra languages.
Microsoft has actually added hooks to the Xbox software stack in the last year or so, so that games will only download/install the audio that is actually required, saving some space.

Using better compression on Audio and Textures could save 10's of Gigabytes in some extreme cases.
The flip side to that is that... Decompression tends to be CPU heavy if you don't have the dedicated capabilities natively in hardware to offload it to... And CPU time is not exactly in abundance on the consoles.

JEMC isn't saying there is zero compression per-say. Just that it's insufficient, it can always be taken another step farther.

I'll reply to JEMC's post tomorrow, but this seems quick.

He is not wrong in the sense that the industry needs to be doing more.
Games cannot come out at 100GB+ for the low end.

On the PC side:
Valve needs to do better.
Steam needs to be better.

Shadow of War and Fallout 4 having high-res texture packs is a clear indicator of Steam's shortcomings.
High-res texture packs should be something handled for the user, more or less automatically.
Valve should be working on, and communicating their plans for asset scaling / language packs.
Valve should be openly striving for systems similar to what the Xbox team has recently added.

Developers stripping all the unnecessary content from each region's version of the game isn't something that can or should be accepted as normal.
Not until the platform holders improve their download management.
If the tools are available to allow a developer to finely manage who gets the required data, and the developers don't utilise the tools: we have an issue.

I am sure the publishers would take issue with a different download for each region (I am fine with yelling at publishers).
I am more willing to blame the platform holders and publishers than the developers doing the heavy lifting (for their title).