[macspoofing]

>It's opinions like this that cause first day downloads for new games like Red Dead Redemption 2 to be 55GBs.

RDR2's size comes from media files (high-resolution textures, models, audio).

Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?

[michaelmrose]

A lot of space in some recent games, truly a bizarre amount has been in some cases dedicated to uncompressed audio.

Given that most people can't tell the difference between high grade mp3 and uncompressed it seems likely that this could be something like mp3.

[Veedrac]

I suspected you meant lossless, but no, Titanfall literally did include 35GB of uncompressed audio. Their reason was to lower the CPU overhead from decompression, which sounds like nonsense to me.

[lazyjones]

> Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?

How about downloading textures and movies on demand in the background when you enter new areas? It's not like all that stuff is required for the game to start.

[michaelmrose]

Given 55GB of data and the internet speed the average person has, the fact that most users will ultimately need to load most data, and the fact that a huge mass of users will need the data on day one this seems like a bad strategy.

[zakius]

tbh I'd use configurable installer: download only these assets you'll be using at worst case allow us to set up everything with full version installed and then cleanup

[macspoofing]

Sure. For the price of increased complexity, you can get something going (and in fact some games do do that, e.g. WoW), but to be clear, you're still downloading 55GB of assets. The game isn't actually any smaller, which is what OP was complaining about.

Also, this is why the big console makers are investing in cloud-consoles.