[WilTimSon]

Well, we have to account for the fact that modern system simply don't require that much optimization and compression. Working with stricter limits meant that dev teams had to get creative and minimize file size, while nowadays a single game update can be around 20 GB.

[HeckFeck]

> nowadays a single game update can be around 20 GB

Irrespective of the abundance of storage we now enjoy, and even though I could rationally understand the reasons, this will always make me raise an eyebrow or sigh.

[fennecfoxy]

As a millennial who has done both embedded and web it doesn't make me sigh at all and usually I find people with that line of thought are just being elitist.

The amount of technology and number and size of assets in a game now is just insane, it is in no way at all comparable to the garage projects for 8bit consoles.

Remember, games used to have to be ported - they were so locked into their particular platform/hardware that porting a game was essentially a total rewrite every single time. Nowadays we can write once, run on every single platform with just hooks into platform specific libs swapped out.

Modern day developers aren't stupid; we're just all used to our current environments, but I would bet that if we all needed to, we could just as easily jump back in to writing everything in asm and custom tailoring it for a particular CPU/hardware. But then modern games would be impossible to actually get finished.

[eru]

Mostly agreed:

> Modern day developers aren't stupid; we're just all used to our current environments, but I would bet that if we all needed to, we could just as easily jump back in to writing everything in asm and custom tailoring it for a particular CPU/hardware.

Some people could jump back in, but not all.

But that's actually progress! You needed to be a wizard to get anything done on eg an Atari 2600 at all. Nowadays, game development is accessible to more and more people.

[VS1999]

This is peak hackernews right here. No, modern developers couldn't just "easily jump back into writing everything in asm". More importantly, no one was talking about writing everything in assembly, he was complaining about 20 GB of bloat getting dumped on everyone who buys a game.

[eru]

You are just getting old. People used to have the same reaction to games that filled up an entire CD (or even multiple).

[VS1999]

Maybe in 20 years people will be complaining about all games taking up 10 TB of space and we'll have people rationalizing the practice because people used to complain about 20 GB patches. Games coming on multiple CDs was a painful experience. Nobody likes that, and nobody liked day-one patches back when they were first introduced and now nobody likes 20 GB patches. Every generation hates pointless bloat.

[JohnBooty]

It's not just "getting old."

For many of us it's an engineer's mindset. We appreciate games for their art and gameplay, and we also appreciate them for their engineering.

So it's a little sad to see that one aspect of game engineering become relatively extinct, even if it's the certainly the correct tradeoff given today's constraints.

[RetroTechie]

> You are just getting old.

I am! But even then, imho sizes should correlate to the detail (graphics / sound), complexity & vastness of virtual worlds embodied in a game.

Not the ease with which developers can fill up the available space.

Yes these are related. But some kind of 1:1 correspondence was lost ages ago.

Optimizing for size, to squeeze out every last byte possible: who still does this in 2024?

[eru]

> But some kind of 1:1 correspondence was lost ages ago.

The ratio has been shifting all this time. There wasn't a one time shift that happened once.

> Optimizing for size, to squeeze out every last byte possible: who still does this in 2024?

You can still find that in the demoscene. A few years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger made a big splash. (Well, it's actually been 20 years. How time flies. But they still make small demos and games today.)

[sgarland]

Eh, not the same. All the games I remember spanning multiple discs (Emperor: Battle for Dune took four, for example) were that large due to FMV cutscenes.

I understand that 3D textures are large files, but surely there is some hideous bloat occurring to cause the explosion in size.

And outside of games, the same bloat occurs, so it’s not just textures. “Let’s ship an entire browser rendering engine with our app” hasn’t exactly helped.

[eru]

Interestingly enough, Hitman (the remakes) slimmed down their installed size by the time Hitman 3 rolled around. They said that thanks to SSDs being around, they didn't have to optimize for the slow random read speeds of HDD anymore.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/oqb7jc/how_is_hitma...