> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost

They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are. And I’d wager very few check the hard disk requirements for a game before buying it. So the effect on their bottom line is negligible while the dev effort to fix it has a cost… so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it.

If they were on the hook for 150GB of cloud storage per player this would have been solved immediately.

I started my career as a software performance engineer. We measured everything across different code implementations, multiple OS, hardware systems, and in various network configurations.

It was amazing how often people wanted to optimize stuff that wasn't a bottleneck in overall performance. Real bottlenecks were often easy to see when you measured and usually simple to fix.

But it was also tough work in the org. It was tedious, time-consuming, and involved a lot of experimental comp sci work. Plus, it was a cost center (teams had to give up some of their budget for perf engineering support) and even though we had racks and racks of gear for building and testing end-to-end systems, what most dev teams wanted from us was to give them all our scripts and measurement tools to "do it themselves" so they didn't have to give up the budget.

11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...

I don't find it surprising at all. A ton of developers do optimizations based on vibes and very rarely check if they're actually getting a real benefit from it.

I'd bet any amount of money a demo ran slow on one stakeholder's computer, who happened to have a mechanical hard drive, they attributed the slowness to the hard drive without a real investigation and optimizing for mechanical hard drive performance became standard practice. The demo may not have even been for this game, just a case of once bitten twice shy.

Game companies these days barely optimize engine graphical performance before release never mind the package size or patching speed. They just stamp higher minimum system requirements on the package.

The game is released on both PC and PS5, the latter of which was designed (and marketed) to take advantage of SSD speeds for streaming game content near real time.

The latest Ratchet and Clank, the poster child used in part to advertise the SSD speed advantage, suffers on traditional hard drives as well in the PC port. Returnal is in the same boat. Both were originally PS5 exclusives.

You missed the most bizarre quote:

> These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns

Unfortunately it's not only game development, all modern society seems operate like this.

IIRC this has been the “done thing” forever. I’m not in game development, but I think I recall hearing about it in the Xbox 360 era. Conventional options are picked by default, benchmarks are needed to overturn that. Looking at my hard drive, massive game installations are still very much the industry standard…

Optimizing for disk space is very low on the priority list for pretty much every game, and this makes sense since its very low on the list of customer concerns relative to things like in-game performance, net code, tweaking game mechanics and balancing etc.

From a business perspective the disk footprint is only a high cost if it results in fewer sales, which I doubt it does to any significant degree. It is wasteful, but can see why optimization efforts would get focused elsewhere.

High cost to who though. We see the same thing when it comes to RAM and CPU usage, the developer is not the one paying for the hardware and many gamers have shown that they will spend money on hardware to play a game they want.

Sure they may loose some sales but I have never seen many numbers on how much it really impacted sales.

Also on the disk side, I can't say I have ever looked at how much space is required for a game before buying it. If I need to clear out some stuff I will. Especially with it not being uncommon for a game to be in the 100gb realm already.

That all being said, I am actually surprised by the 11% using mechanical hard drives. I figured that NVME would be a lower percentage and many are using SSD's... but I figured the percent with machines capable of running modern games in the first place with mechanical drives would be far lower.

I do wonder how long it will be until we see games just saying they are not compatible with mechanical drives.

>It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

You should look at COD install sizes and almost weekly ridiculously huge "updates". 150gb for a first install is almost generous considering most AAA games.

Twenty years ago I bought a 1TB harddrive... It wasn't very expensive either.

Twenty years on, and somehow that's still 'big'.

Computing progress disappoints me.

I think smaller game sizes would hurt sales. Your first though on a 23gb game when other games are 100 plus is, why is there so little content?

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost

Wait till you find out what engine this game is made in. https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-ii-was-built-on-an-archaic...