Comment by somat
16 days ago
At one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size, They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.
When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.
> When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.
Maybe that'll start to change since ram is the new gold and who knows what the AI bubble will eat next
> They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.
This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.
>The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download
All Steam downloads are automatically compressed. It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
> The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
Even when Titanfall 2 was released in 2016, I don't think that was meaningfully the case. Audio compression formats have been tuned heavily for efficient playback.
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> All Steam downloads are automatically compressed.
Titanfall wasn't on steam when it launched.
> It's also irrelevant. The point is that playback of uncompressed audio is indeed cheaper than playback of compressed audio.
The person that I replied to (not you) claimed "They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute."
> The point is that playback of uncompressed audio
Bullshit. This is not a problem since 2003.
And nobody forbids you to actually decompress your compressed audio when you are loading the assets from the disk.
I remember seeing warez game releases in the late 90s that had custom packaging to de-compress sound effects that were stored uncompressed in the original installer.
It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.
Wasn't that Titanfall 1? I remember Titanfall 2 having a much smaller installation size.
This is conspiratorial nonsense.