CityHunter1981
Member
I am always wondering why the file sizes became so big for nearly all games. Is it laziness on the developer side or are there other reasons behind it.
I grew up in the times of Commodore 64 and later than the Nintendo Entertainment system and the file sizes at that time were so small compared to today:
NES (between 8 kB and 1 MB)
SNES (between 0.23 MB and 4 MB)
Now, fast forward to today and we barely see games that have smaller sizes than 1GB.
Now I am not stupid, I know that modern games need a lot more space because of the higher resolution which also require much higher resolution textiles, the better quality in Sound, Music etc. So I am not saying that so small sizes should be common, but I feel that many developers became lazy with the availability of so much more space.
For example, there are a lot of compression techniques available which would probably make it possible for the sizes to be much smaller, but I think developers these days don't care about it anymore so much, like they used to, when there was only limited space available.
Another example are all these indie games, which are made to look like NES or SNES games, but there file size is usually not even near the file sizes from that time.
So do you feel most games need to be so big and eat away all the space on our hard-drives or do you also feel that due to the comfort of available space developers became lazy and games are much bigger than they need to be.
I grew up in the times of Commodore 64 and later than the Nintendo Entertainment system and the file sizes at that time were so small compared to today:
NES (between 8 kB and 1 MB)
SNES (between 0.23 MB and 4 MB)
Now, fast forward to today and we barely see games that have smaller sizes than 1GB.
Now I am not stupid, I know that modern games need a lot more space because of the higher resolution which also require much higher resolution textiles, the better quality in Sound, Music etc. So I am not saying that so small sizes should be common, but I feel that many developers became lazy with the availability of so much more space.
For example, there are a lot of compression techniques available which would probably make it possible for the sizes to be much smaller, but I think developers these days don't care about it anymore so much, like they used to, when there was only limited space available.
Another example are all these indie games, which are made to look like NES or SNES games, but there file size is usually not even near the file sizes from that time.
So do you feel most games need to be so big and eat away all the space on our hard-drives or do you also feel that due to the comfort of available space developers became lazy and games are much bigger than they need to be.