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.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    OK wtf is with the posts about “western game dev”, as if that has anything at all to do with disk space?

    • dalekcaan@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • leftytighty@slrpnk.net
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • dalekcaan@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          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.

      • catsup@lemmy.oneOP
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        2 months ago

        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

          • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            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.

      • osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org
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        2 months ago

        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

        • AllYourSmurf@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I keep seeing that. Is BTW a reference to a particular build of Arch, or a particular way of setting up your Arch distro?

          By the way, I’m familiar with Linux in general. Just curious about this particular thing.

          • gwen@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 months ago

            arch is infamous for being kinda hard to install ESPECIALLY when it first came out (i dont think it’s that bad tbh) and it was a common thing on forums for elitists to say ‘oh i use arch btw’ (btw meaning by the way) to sound better than the other ppl on there

          • dorumon@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            No, no its just a well written joke. Like he can’t talk that he uses arch linux.

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I have heard rumors that it keeps a separate copy of every dinosaur and object for each map and that is why it is so gigantic. hard to guess what would force them such a design though

      • asmoranomar@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        In it’s early days? My nephew played that a long time ago. It filled his PC. I thought it was mods. As in, the entire game would clone itself when it created a mod profile. I don’t think it does that anymore.

    • Akatsuki Levi@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      No, it’s a steam item miner

      EDIT: to explain, clicking the banana gives you random “Steam Inventory” items, that players can sell on the marketplace The entire thing is just money laundry