I redownloaded Stardew Valley last night and was amazed to find it’s still less than a Gigabyte.
I know it’s not the same as a hyperrealistic 3D game, but I’m still amazed at how much stuff he keeps adding, but it hasn’t even scratched a GB.
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.
Sekiro is only 13GB and I think that’s very neat
Animal Well is like, 40Mb
There are plenty of 8GB games, we need to lower our expectations.
you don’t get 4k with matching textures and pre-lit levels the size of texas for free.
Go back to 8GB and 3-4 year releases
So what you’re saying is that we need more ray traced games. Don’t have to waste a bunch of space pre-baking lighting when it’s calculated in realtime!
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.
I miss the days when you could choose to stream most of the large assets directly from the CD, because taking up 600MB on your hard drive was too much to ask for.
I don’t miss those loading times though; for better or worse, SSDs have changed the game (no pun intended).