| > The reason why games are tens or hundreds of gigabytes in size is that modern textures are high-resolution and models are high in detail; not "the reason", just "a reason". A lot of it is just laziness. Not compressing audio and video or doing a very poor job of it. For example a Fortnite update took the game from 60GB to 30GB without making it look like garbage so how did they do it? Optimization. Why didn't they do it sooner? Because they didn't care. > The reason why Web sites are big is largely images, videos, JS, and CSS; if you took away broadband, you'd end up with worse-looking and less functional Web sites. Video and images are again "a" reason (and again often the issue is poor compression) but so are bloated JS frameworks, user tracking, and ads. Even very simple websites can bloat to grow larger than full novels. (there are some good examples of this here: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm). You could cut the ads and the tracking and the JS bloat without any impact on the content delivered or the functionality. People just don't want to take the effort to lower file sizes which is why people have to turn to things like repackers who can cut the sizes for downloads by more than half. Somehow they manage, and they do it for free no less, but game publishers can't? We could do much better without sacrificing anything (that users care about) in the finished product. If we had to go back to slower processors people would be forced to care enough to write better code and optimize for speed. At least until some new trick for faster speed was developed at which point very little in our lives would be faster, but the code would be slower again. |