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