alt Hacker News> If someone "takes pride in their work" and makes my game load five times longer, I'd rather they go find something else to take pride in.
And others who wish one single game didn't waste 130GB of their disk space, it's fine to ignore their opinions?
They used up a ton more disk space to apply an ill-advised optimization that didn't have much effect. I don't really understand why you'd consider that a positive thing.
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> They used up a ton more disk space to apply an ill-advised optimization that didn't have much effect.
The optimization was not ill-advised. It is in fact, an industry standard and is strongly advised. Their own internal testing revealed that they are one of the supposedly rare cases where this optimization did not have a noticeably positive effect worth the costs.
By their own industry data (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/49158394...), deduplication causes a 5x performance increase loading data from HDD. There's a reason so many games are huge, and it's not because they're mining your HDD for HDDCoin.
The "problem" is a feature. The "so it remains unfixed until someone with pride in their work finally carves out the time to do it" mindset suggests that they were simply too lazy to ever run fdupes over their install directory, which is simply not the case. The duplication was intentional, and is still intentional in many other games that could but likely won't apply the same data minimization.
I'll gladly take this update because considerable effort was spent on measuring the impact, but not one of those "everyone around me is so lazy, I'll just be the noble hero to sacrifice my time to deduplicate the game files" updates.