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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
