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Comment by habbekrats

24 days ago

it seems wild the state of games and development today... imagine 131GB out of 154GB of data was not needed....

24 comments

habbekrats

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maccard  16 days ago

This isn't unique to games, and it's not just "today". Go back a decade [0] find people making similar observations about one of the largest tech companies on the planet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338

  • Cthulhu_  15 days ago

    And that's consumer apps, having only glimpsed in the world of back-end / cloud shenanigans, there's heaps of data being generated and stored in datacenters. Useful data? Dunno, how useful are all access logs ever?

    But it's stored because it's possible, easy, and cheap. Unlike older games, where developers would hide unused blocks of empty data for some last-minute emergency cramming if they needed it.

  • lynnharry  16 days ago

    > FB App is 114MB in size, but loading this page in Chrome will use a good 450MB, idk how they managed that.

    This reminds me of the old days when I check who's using my PC memory every now and then.

high_na_euv  16 days ago

It was needed. Just the trade off wasnt worth it.

  • red-iron-pine  16 days ago

    it wasn't needed -- need means "must have"

    they're a fantastically popular franchise with a ton of money... and did it without the optimizations.

    if they never did these optimizations they'd still have a hugely popular, industry leading game

    minor tweaks to weapon damage will do more to harm their bottom line compared to any backend optimization

wvbdmp  24 days ago

The whole world took a wrong turn when we moved away from physical media.

  • tetris11  24 days ago

    In terms of ownership, yes absolutely. In terms of read/write speeds to physical media, the switch to an SSD has been unsung gamechanger.

    That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

    • crote  16 days ago

      > That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

      Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!

      Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.

    • BizarroLand  24 days ago

      I hate it when you buy a physical game, insert the disk, and immediately have to download the game in order to play the game because the disk only contains a launcher and a key. Insanity of the worst kind.

      7 replies →

    • Cthulhu_  15 days ago

      Maybe, but I'd argue the on-board storage chips literally an inch away from the CPU / GPU of the PS5 are faster these days. But in between cartridge consoles and fast hard drive consoles there was a disk-based gap where seek times were an issue.