Gaming

how little goes into optimizing that since “space is cheap”

More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people's systems as if they aren't needed for anything else.

And speaking of environmental costs, there's also the pollution and e-waste generated by constantly pushing people to upgrade their hardware instead of optimizing the software.

As a developer myself, I find it embarrassing and sad.

I'm fully behind the idea that you should be able to opt for not downloading the biggest texture files and 3D assets, if you're gonna play at low settings, anyway.

But it's worth noting that "optimizing" the file sizes of high-fidelity games isn't really possible. You can't compress textures or 3D assets the same way you might an RGB image. Game textures contain a lot more layers than just color, in modern games they can contain material, depth and specularity maps, just to name a few. And that's before considering any accompanying bre-baked lighting data that entire levels may come with, which trades in the need to real-time render stuff for doing it in advance and storing how something is supposed to look, and shipping it alongside the game.

None of this can be easily compressed. It has to be retained losslessly, or you risk rendering artefacts.

Also, most game distribution services will send you an AGGRESSIVELY compressed (as in packed as a whole, using great amounts of CPU to pack it smaller without data loss) format, which your PC/console unpacks as it downloads. They too have every reason to save bandwidth.

But even then, you seldom see data savings of more than 10-30%. There just aren't that many corners to cut.

Space might be cheap, but SSDs are too small for the slot they take up that could've had a much bigger HDD, and now graphics cards are so big there's physically less room for disks and cables too.

I don't want all SSDs to have room for all the games and nothing else.

I’d love to play through the Mass Effect remastered collection on my steam deck but it’s ridiculous that it makes you download all 3 games (100+ GB). On the other hand, Halo MCC is actually good about this and lets you download only the games you want to play at the moment

Seems like the common vibe in "gaming" articles lately. Low hanging fruit Clickbait slathered in ads and autoplaying videos.

My man is trying to install both games on a PlayStation One memory card

Starfield has ssd listed as "required". Even if it runs from a HDD it might be horrible, like with No Man's Sky.

A 2TB SSD can be had for like £100. I even put one in my PS5.

Same. Those comments are coming from a place of privilege.

A lot of people in a first world country can't afford splurges like that anymore. In third world countries it's even worse. Because of import fees, scarcity, and price gauging, a $60 SSD can easily become $100+. In some countries that's over half of the average monthly income

Where do you get your hard drives? Cheapest 1tb SSD I can get is $65, and the cheapest 1tb nvme drive is $80.

It does depend on the device though. A desktop PC can easily be upgraded with a new drive, but a laptop it may not be as easy, or in some cases, not possible at all. Could always use an external drive, but those are usually more expensive and quite inconvenient if you move the laptop around.

If you're paying $20/TB, you're probably getting ripped off with some counterfeit garbage from a no-name Chinese Amazon seller that's not even close to the advertised capacity. I wouldn't put anything on one of those drives that I have any intention of keeping for longer than a week at that price.

Idk about this price I call shenanigans. I just bought an m.2 drive 2tb for $80 and that was a DEAL for me.

So here's some perspective from a poor grad student's life:

After getting the m.2 and an m.2 housing to do the transfer that left me broke for some time considering I only make $10/hr + (shitty commission) and bills/food are insane.

What I really need to upgrade now is my processor, but again doing something like this really is a luxury. Are all my bills paid? Have I spent a good amount on food recently? Like right now I need an oil change and some new tires so that's yet another month AT LEAST of putting off the upgrade.

Before I was putting it off bc I had to move to go back to school and I hadn't found a job yet in the new location.

Before that I was putting it off to save up for the process of moving and buying out of my old lease after a crazy roommate disagreement (I always have roommates bc I can't afford to live by myself).

Before that I had to help a friend get out of an abusive relationship and support them for a while, while they got back on their feet.

Before that my other friend blew up my car's engine and I had to blow every cent of my savings on a new car.

And while it's true that I could've probably tightened my belt a few times or cut out an unnecessary luxury here or there to get the upgrades I wanted the bottom line is: priority.

The REAL bottom line is: buying games is expensive all by itself and frankly I'd rather come home crack open a beer and try to forget that I'm selling every hour of my life to my capitalist overlords than I would have a few extra fps. I'd rather cut myself some slack/some time to study by eating out for a night than be able to hold a bunch of these mega giant ass games on my drive.

I'd MUCH rather gaming companies take care of THEIR workers and give them reasonable time frames to finish games and optimize them than I would have a brand new triple A title come out glitchy as fuck just in time for whatever holiday season they think my poor ass will be able to afford it (spoiler that season is steam summer sale bc I'll be damned if I buy 99% of games full price.)

tl;dr gaming may be one of my getaways from life but I'd rather game companies prioritize giving their workers time to optimize and complete games. I'd rather me prioritize the small day to day luxuries that get me by in life than prioritize having a baller computer to play those glitchy unfinished unoptimized new titles.

isnt that only 400 something GB?

PC is about 130 GB I believe.

Yea, some kind of custom install would be good. Can't be hard to program a dialogue before download that'll select the right assets to install, saving both disk space and bandwidth.

Starfield heavily leans on procedural generation. It would be many times bigger if it didn't. BG3 has something like 170 hours of recorded dialogue. Cutting down means getting of features.

So no, there is no room for optimization here. These games are just going to be that big, period. People just need to accept that they will have to get giant SSDs in the future.