A Meme. The first half shows a screenshot of the game “Banana” on Steam, showing how it weighs 1.89 Gigabytes. The second half shows a couple of native americans talking on a snowy landscape while inspecting footprints on the snow.

Native A: A western game dev has been here. Native B: How can you tell? Native A: It weighs 1.89 Gigabytes.

  • @xantoxis
    link
    English
    542 months ago

    OK wtf is with the posts about “western game dev”, as if that has anything at all to do with disk space?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      102 months ago

      I’m not sure it’s exclusive to Western developers, as I don’t know much about software in other parts of the world, but there does seem to be an unfortunate trend of companies forgoing software optimization because modern computers are usually beefy enough to handle it, and it’s cheaper to ship out inefficient slapdash software than it is to take the time and resources to fix it.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        32 months ago

        Not making excuses for every instance but in the vast majority of cases, optimizations are done by making trades between runtime performance, RAM usage, and disk space. Of these, disk is cheapest. You might optimize something and end up using more disk space as a result.

        For example not all video cards support compressed texture file formats (though gaming hardware is likely to be close to 100% now…) so you might store texture memory uncompressed on disk (bigger size) to save on the decompression needing to happen on the CPU before transfer to the GPU.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          12 months ago

          I mean sure, there are always concessions to be made, but what I had in mind was more the “include this entire 6 GB library so I can use this particular function once” kind of bloat.

      • @[email protected]OP
        link
        fedilink
        362 months ago

        Western countries (USA) often have rich economies, which means that the average person in said countries often has better access to high amounts of storage than people from impoverished countries. This makes it so it’s not a priority for companies targeting that audience to optimize for disk space.

        TLDR: Rich countries get beefy PCs, which get unoptimized games

        • @yokonzo
          link
          22
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          1.9gb is a high amount of storage?

          • @thedirtyknapkin
            link
            12 months ago

            their point is that this is a game with maybe 50 still image assets and absurdly simply gameplay. it could be like 2MB, but it was likely built on preexisting assets and code that don’t try to be lightweight.

            the point is that 10 years ago the exact same game would have been like 25MB at most. I’m not familiar enough with the changes in the tools used by Indy devs in the time, but my guess is that it’s where you’ll find the reason.

      • osaerisxero
        link
        fedilink
        52 months ago

        I think the OP’s explanation is the real one, but I still like to think this is a thing where more than one thing can be true

      • @Shady_Shiroe
        link
        32 months ago

        We like our apps to match our waists xD

        • @AllYourSmurf
          link
          52 months ago

          I keep seeing that. Is BTW a reference to a particular build of Arch, or a particular way of setting up your Arch distro?

          By the way, I’m familiar with Linux in general. Just curious about this particular thing.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            32 months ago

            arch is infamous for being kinda hard to install ESPECIALLY when it first came out (i dont think it’s that bad tbh) and it was a common thing on forums for elitists to say ‘oh i use arch btw’ (btw meaning by the way) to sound better than the other ppl on there

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    18
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    The worst offender I’ve ever seen is Ark and that’s a Chinese developer. It’s over 400GB to install Ark.

    • @iAvicenna
      link
      22 months ago

      I have heard rumors that it keeps a separate copy of every dinosaur and object for each map and that is why it is so gigantic. hard to guess what would force them such a design though

      • @asmoranomar
        link
        12 months ago

        In it’s early days? My nephew played that a long time ago. It filled his PC. I thought it was mods. As in, the entire game would clone itself when it created a mod profile. I don’t think it does that anymore.

  • @aeronmelon
    link
    112 months ago

    Without checking, is it a bitcoin miner?

    • Akatsuki Levi
      link
      English
      38
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      No, it’s a steam item miner

      EDIT: to explain, clicking the banana gives you random “Steam Inventory” items, that players can sell on the marketplace The entire thing is just money laundry

        • Akatsuki Levi
          link
          English
          12 months ago

          FOMO The entire reason why people buy is the thought they could sell for more to people that also want to buy to sell for more