I was shocked to find out that Balatro was like 80 MB to download. You don't need million-poly models and 8k textures to make an really good game. Granted, yeah it's a 2D game, but it's a beautifully-presented one.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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Apparently most of that file size comes from localisation requirements too.
Animal Well has a 35mb install according to Steam.
Games like that have nothing to prove. The product speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, games that take up 300gb of your disk often do this purposefully. In the case of console games, they know it will monopolize your system. The game usually isn’t even enjoyable, but it’s too big to delete randomly, so you gaslight yourself into committing to it
each cod game also costs around 450 million dollars to make, so i can’t help but imagine that some of the file size bloat is caused by a need to “justify” the budget in some way. because as we all know, 300gb games have so much more game when compared to a measly 60gb game. you won’t be getting dynamically sized horse balls in a game that only takes up 60gb.
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Aka: CoD. I honestly still don't understand how people can justify to themselves the $70 price point for each game, or the sheer ridiculous size of the fucking thing. It's gotta be mental gymnastics, right? Are they really that good that people will overlook the bullshit like shitty launchers and Warzone bleeding into how the games play nowadays?
Their target market is young teenagers who don't care about that stuff
Animal Well is a staggering work of art on multiple fronts, not least of which is the code golf required to keep its size so small. Incredible game.
Im surprised it's that much given how simple the graphics are.
Going against the grain here but I'd like to see a mod or DLC that changes pixel-art to vector art or something. Or maybe something like Windows 7 Solitaire?🤞
Liibraries with their dependencies can take up a fair bit of that space easily these days. I dunno how many would be used in a game like that but that'd be my guess for the space needed.
Absolutely not. Compiled code is small, really small. I'd be surprised if the engine* itself as a whole was more than a gigabyte in size. It's all about the assets that are included, how badly they're compressed and how uselessly detailed some of them are.
*The embedded one of course. The editors are unruly beasts that'll guzzle up your disk space, but then again it's probably a similar situation...
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Valheim, a massive open world filled with interesting monsters and beautiful stylistic graphics is 1gb
to be fair, the 4k textures etc take up most of the space in large 3d games. valheim has a low poly and low quality textures style with a lot of repeats. it only looks good thanks to lighting.
with such a design choice you have an unfair advantage over photorealism and large variety.
we should however compare different games of the same style. did they use the 8k ulta detailed Hamburger models or did they actually think about Ressource and space management ?
It's also, as tons of people have said about the Arkham series, about art style. The Valheim style looks really good because they have incredible artists working on the game.
Just like Arkham Knight is still one of the best looking games I've ever seen even though it's almost 9 years old, Valheim will still probably look just as good the same amount of time later.
Well we had to use the 10k triangle toothbrush model, no two ways about it! (/s/)
I agree. We're not the first ones to point it out, but theres a strong argument to be made for graphical style over graphical fidelity. Working to achieve a particular stylised choice tends to give a visual medium greater longevity.
There's a reason why people remember details about Jurassic Park over something like Avatar; or Star Fox over the latest Call of Duty.
Technology has made some things look better over the years, but the things that really get remembered visually are the style choices.
Just because one game takes up a quarter of your hard drive doesn't make it more impressive than a sub 1 GB game.
That and with stylized graphics you stand a much greater chance of being able to see just what the hell is happening on the screen.
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Game's size depends on many factors. Besides devs' laziness or the abundance of inique assets and dupes, I had a fun ride with Vermintide 2 whose devs were able to cut game's size from 100gb+ to 60gb+ at once because they added all incrimental updates as additional archives and also prefered to have all assets for one level in one place even if they are shared, so it grew out of proportion over the years before they decided to cause a complete asset restructurement and dublicate hunt before the major update. It made players redownload big chunks of the game but resulted in a way less terrifying size to those players they wanted to start it or return into.
Downloaded factorio yesterday at a wopping ~1.5 gig
What game is this?
Have noticed western devs typically can't reduce file size for shit. Something like killing floor 2 is 97 gigs and elden ring (last i looked) was under 50
When games get this big it merely ensures that they get uninstalled the moment I lose a bit of interest.
For me it ensures I don't install them in the first place and just don't buy the game
What's that FPS someone made to be as small of a file as possible? It's like a Quake rip-off, but the game runs as a single executable and is small enough to barely take up the space of a floppy disk (like just a few kilobytes)?
Doom
(/s)
8gb is probably a bit too small for most photorealistic style games at maximum settings, but maybe they should introduce optional games asset support to steam. No point downloading the full resolution textures if you're playing on low texture settings.
Yeah, alot of games in their own launchers have that option, but bought through steam don't, steam needs a clean way of supporting multiple install formats, I guess.
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What 8GB. Some of the best games ever fit in a floppy disk (a real life save icon for the gen z people around here).
A floppy? How many copies of kkreiger do you need?
I need the rest of the space for my humongous demos collection.
The first section of my disc box was for demos. The rest for games. The games sometimes got overwritten, but the demos never got sacrificed, because those were hard to get.
These days I just go to pouet.net and watch the YouTube clips. I know, it's a ridiculous procedure to stream megabytes of video to watch a 100kb demo run, but I just can't be bothered to make my pc run anything by itself anymore.
Transport Tycoon.
Although that may have been 3 floppies.
Lmao, I didn't know someone could be condescending about floppy disc's, but here we are.
It's a joke and I didn't intend it to be condescending.
Back in high school i had a floppy with an NES emulator and several games. Was able to play nes game on school computers. Never got caught doing that lol
Reject modernity, Return to Zork
But I don't particularly feel like being eaten by a Grue.
No point in playing that game lmao
ARK?