Without reading the article:
- High resolution textures
- large maps
- audio
- Internet cache
- shaders
- code left for debugging and data collection
All of those are in good faith. A part of it is in bad faith as well though. Studios forgoing or at least deprioritizing optimalisation. Why waste weeks on Q&A when you can just yawn and tell consumers to upgrade if it doesn’t affect your bottom line?
Case in point: COD MWIII All of the internet is (rightly) shitting on it but Activision won’t care because they’ll likely still sell several million copies. What incentive does that give them to NOT fire entire Q&A departments and pocket those cost savings on top of the profits?
QA what? You can’t QA and optimise huge ass textures to fit into a gig. I can tell you a story about high res images. My partner is a photographer. She did a commissioned project of 7 collage photos to be printed in large scale. She bought a 512 gig drive to work on a project. These 7 photos took 95% of the space of this drive in the end. Yeah, 500 gigs for 7 bloody photos!
And readily available resources. No need to put effort into space saving tricks when space is so easy to come by
Plus downloadability. If you don’t plan to play a game for a while, you can delete it and free up space, and have the ability to download it later.
Plus, expandable storage. If a player wants more space, I think that everything out there today is expandable, even consoles, without replacing existing storage. If, say, 10% of the player base wants to keep a larger library downloaded than their console’s internal storage can handle, and the base console doesn’t have enough space, they can just throw another USB drive on the system.
I guess maybe for portable devices, it could be obnoxious to carry the storage around.
Nah, portable devices use portable storage. The space available in microSD is nuts
