A Meme. The first half shows a screenshot of the game “Banana” on Steam, showing how it weighs 1.89 Gigabytes. The second half shows a couple of native americans talking on a snowy landscape while inspecting footprints on the snow.
Native A: A western game dev has been here. Native B: How can you tell? Native A: It weighs 1.89 Gigabytes.
OK wtf is with the posts about “western game dev”, as if that has anything at all to do with disk space?
Maybe they are making fun of obesity?
Western countries (USA) often have rich economies, which means that the average person in said countries often has better access to high amounts of storage than people from impoverished countries. This makes it so it’s not a priority for companies targeting that audience to optimize for disk space.
TLDR: Rich countries get beefy PCs, which get unoptimized games
1.9gb is a high amount of storage?
For a banana clicker, yes
That’s bigger than the Fedora ISO
Yes
No, it really isn’t… Not in 2024.
It’s a game where you click bananas.
There is no reason for it to be so large. It is a banana. That you click.
As a person who have 32 GB storage on my mobile device. It is.
It’s not a mobile game though.
You’re right. It actually has less content than any mobile game except cookie clicker (and even then it’s arguable cookie clicker has more content). In reality this should fit on an 8gb phone from 2010 because it is literally just a single image of a banana that you click on.
their point is that this is a game with maybe 50 still image assets and absurdly simply gameplay. it could be like 2MB, but it was likely built on preexisting assets and code that don’t try to be lightweight.
the point is that 10 years ago the exact same game would have been like 25MB at most. I’m not familiar enough with the changes in the tools used by Indy devs in the time, but my guess is that it’s where you’ll find the reason.
I think the OP’s explanation is the real one, but I still like to think this is a thing where more than one thing can be true
We like our apps to match our waists xD
I’m not sure it’s exclusive to Western developers, as I don’t know much about software in other parts of the world, but there does seem to be an unfortunate trend of companies forgoing software optimization because modern computers are usually beefy enough to handle it, and it’s cheaper to ship out inefficient slapdash software than it is to take the time and resources to fix it.
Not making excuses for every instance but in the vast majority of cases, optimizations are done by making trades between runtime performance, RAM usage, and disk space. Of these, disk is cheapest. You might optimize something and end up using more disk space as a result.
For example not all video cards support compressed texture file formats (though gaming hardware is likely to be close to 100% now…) so you might store texture memory uncompressed on disk (bigger size) to save on the decompression needing to happen on the CPU before transfer to the GPU.
I mean sure, there are always concessions to be made, but what I had in mind was more the “include this entire 6 GB library so I can use this particular function once” kind of bloat.