alt Hacker NewsArrowhead probably deserves more love for breaking the norm but I think it's overshadowed by people finding out for the first time the reason HDDs are so common in gaming setups is companies have been blindly shaving a few seconds off HDD load time off at the cost of 7x the disk space.
If it had been more well known this was the cause of game bloat before then this probably would have been better received. Still, Arrowhead deserves more credit both for testing and breaking the norm as well as making it a popular topic.
Replies
nopurpose • yesterday at 7:46 PM
My immediate question is that if all of that was on-disk data duplication, why did it affected download size? Can't small download be expanded into optimal layout on the client side?
➕ show 3 replies
Part of what makes this outrageous is that the install size itself is probably a significant part of the reason to install the game on an HDD.
154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.
Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in the first place?