Bloatware

[AlexanderPeregrine]

I'm reinstalling Starcraft II in preparation for when Amazon gets around to sending me my copy of the expansion and I was reminded of something that just really bugs me with games these days: stupid file sizes. The vanilla game installed from an original disc takes up 12 gigabytes, with this "optimization" program demanding 7.4 gigabytes in downloaded crap before it's just the way Blizzard intends for me to experience it. According to a few sites, Heart of the Swarm requires 20 gigabytes, but the wording is kind of vague. It just says Starcraft II, so I hope this is the combined footprint. For comparison, here are ten SNES RPGs with longer average playtimes with cartridge sizes between 1-6 megabytes [http://www.angelfire.com/electronic2/top10snes/].

Have companies stopped even trying to compress anything any more? I'm at a loss why they would let games get this bloated if they intend to eventually transition to a digital-only model. I have what I assume is the average midwest American internet connection with an average cap of 300 kilobytes a second (whatever Earthlink leases in Illinois) and it takes about an hour per gigabyte assuming no outages or timeouts. I don't know about anyone else, but twenty hours is a pretty big demand to make of a consumer. Not only that, the cost of running these servers and providing these gigantic downloads to thousands of consumers can't possibly be cheap.

So, does anyone else think the companies are lazing about when it comes to compression? Or am I wrong and these games are already compressed from 50-100 gigabytes? I'm not that in-tune with the technicalities here, so any information that would shed a light on this issue would be awesome.

 

[sanquin]

Back in those days they had no choice. A cartridge could only contain so many megabytes, so they -had- to make their games small enough to fit on them. These days people have terabytes or at the least hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. And console disks can hold many gigabytes of information too. So they stopped caring as much about how large their games get in terms of disk space. That, and it's hard to compare an 8 to 16 bit game with the graphical wonders of tens of thousands of polygons and huge visible worlds that we have today.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Here's the thing, the biggest things that take up the most space aren't really the "game," they're the detailed art assets and the sounds, things that older games, even really long ones, didn't have a lot of. Voice-acting for a decently long game can be well over half of the game's total file size (even more if they have voice acting for a bunch of different languages.

So the size of the game doesn't really have that much to do with it's length, now calm down.

 

[DoPo]

Not only that, the cost of running these servers and providing these gigantic downloads to thousands of consumers can't possibly be cheap.

Actually, Blizzard has found a creative solution here. You're going to lo-o-ove this - they actually have peer to peer distribution of the patches - while you're downloading stuff, you're also uploading to other people. Helps reduce the load on their servers but they also back it up with machines seeding the patches -they just don't need that many of them.

While it is a good idea, I believe it has some rather...poor implementation. At least from what I saw from my flatmate who plays StarCraft 2 - last week-ish, there was some update that was 100MB or more, I think, and the damn updater just started hogging the internet connection making over 200 TCP connection which sort of brought the not great internet we have to its knees. And it apparently wouldn't stop if you go into a game, unless you explicitly configured it to stop if you played. Or maybe it was a bug or something, but he had to go change some configs somewhere to basically say "No, I don't want you to be seeding the update in the background while I play, because you're killing my connection and causing one hell of a lag".

As for actual game sizes, if I'm not mistaken, it's textures, especially high resolution ones, that inflate a lot of it. Also cutscenes, I'd imagine. And Might and Magic Clash of Heroes had a lot of bloat for...putting uncompressed music on there - yeah - sounds better but I doubt that was a priority for the game. Actually, I'm looking at Heroes 6 right now and 3 out of 8 something gigabytes of installation, are something to do with foreign localisation (Spanish, French, Russian, and German)...I'd call that bloat.

If you want something to blame - blame disks. Both the plastic ones and the hard drives. Mostly, it's assumed that a modern machine would be able to hold the installation of the game, so hard drive space is not considered an issue (although if you want more games, as well as other stuff...yeah). So the most limiting factor are the plastic disks (and other removable media) - the more you have, the more annoying it is. But when you replace CDs with DVDs which have several times the capacity, you can distribute larger games. And then you have Blu-rays which allow even more. It's convenient when shipping it physically - you can put all your bullshit on it and it doesn't really impact you - in fact you're better off putting more - whether you put a gigabyte or 3 gigabytes on a DVD involves roughly the same amount of effort and cost, not triple - so you might as well. But if you try digitally distributing that...yeah - with Heroes 6, I now have about a third of a game to be languages I'll never use. And I had to download each bit, to the last one before I could play it. As for large patches...I don't know...I've got no clue what they put on there, and it seems each game has a different thing. Some ship entire binaries to new versions, and Torchlight 2, for example, pretty much had you redownload half the game with each new patch (I think it stopped doing that a couple of patches ago).

 

[Vault101]

snip.

I dont think bloatware means what you think it means.....

anyway, what do you expect? games have alot of stuff in the now days..polygons..textures, that stuff takes space

now having to download gigs of data on top of the game you already installed...that is a vaild complaint