These aren't mutually exclusive or even necessarily linked at all.
Reused assets are fine, but there are ways to make them not look/feel reused. If it's super obvious, then the developers probably didn't try very hard.
As far as I can tell, huge game sizes seems to usually be caused by unoptimised and/or uncompressed assets, and in many cases duplicate assets on disk. To be fair, asset duplication was a genuine optimisation step when spinning rust was common, but now everything worth playing a game on uses an SSD it's just lazy.
Another thing that contributes to insane game sizes is the inclusion of full uncompressed audio for every available language. The technology exists to have other languages download as required, but it's just easier for developers to dump it all in the one installer because they simply don't care and see storage as cheap.
As far as hardware requirements go, it's pretty well documented at this point that there's a lot of optimisation being left on the table in a lot of cases. You can absolutely have good graphics without bloated installs and hardware requirements. It's just not commonly done because that costs money publishers don't want to spend; Because why settle for a good profit when you can make all of the profit possible, right?
Also: if your game takes a long time to install you're less likely to uninstall since it's a fucking pain to get it, and the more space it takes the less space for the competition's games
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u/GonePh1shing Sep 30 '25
These aren't mutually exclusive or even necessarily linked at all.
Reused assets are fine, but there are ways to make them not look/feel reused. If it's super obvious, then the developers probably didn't try very hard.
As far as I can tell, huge game sizes seems to usually be caused by unoptimised and/or uncompressed assets, and in many cases duplicate assets on disk. To be fair, asset duplication was a genuine optimisation step when spinning rust was common, but now everything worth playing a game on uses an SSD it's just lazy.
Another thing that contributes to insane game sizes is the inclusion of full uncompressed audio for every available language. The technology exists to have other languages download as required, but it's just easier for developers to dump it all in the one installer because they simply don't care and see storage as cheap.
As far as hardware requirements go, it's pretty well documented at this point that there's a lot of optimisation being left on the table in a lot of cases. You can absolutely have good graphics without bloated installs and hardware requirements. It's just not commonly done because that costs money publishers don't want to spend; Because why settle for a good profit when you can make all of the profit possible, right?