alt Hacker NewsAt one point, I think it was TitanFall2, the pc port of a game deliberately converted it's audio to uncompressed wav files in order to inflate the install size, They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.
When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
People probably feel the same about this, why were they so disrespectful of our space and bandwidth in the first place? But I agree it is very nice that they wrote up the details in this instance.
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> They said it was for performance but the theory was to make it more inconvenient for pirates to distribute.
This doesn't even pass the sniff test. The files would just be compressed for distribution and decompressed on download. Pirated games are well known for having "custom" installers.
I remember seeing warez game releases in the late 90s that had custom packaging to de-compress sound effects that were stored uncompressed in the original installer.
It seems no one takes pride in their piracy anymore.
Wasn't that Titanfall 1? I remember Titanfall 2 having a much smaller installation size.
This is conspiratorial nonsense.
> When the details of exactly why the game was so large came out, many people felt this was a sort of customer betrayal, The publisher was burning a large part of the volume of your precious high speed sdd for a feature that added nothing to the game.
Software developers of all kinds (not just game publishers) have a long and rich history of treating their users' compute resources as expendable. "Oh, users can just get more memory, it's cheap!" "Oh, xxxGB is such a small hard drive these days, users can get a bigger one!" "Oh, most users have Pentiums by now, we can drop 486 support!" Over and over we've seen companies choose to throw their users under the bus so that they can cheap out on optimizing their product.