Are game sizes becoming a issue?

[McFuckyy96]

So I've been seeing more and more games are sitting more comfortably at multiple GB in size, I semi regularly see games reaching 4-7+ GB, as someone who doesn't have particularly fast internet (Only about 100mb/s) I have to wonder is anyone else starting to get concerned with how big these games are getting size wise. Now I don't really have a problem waiting a few hours to download something, the bigger concern are these file-hosting sites that most free ones have data caps like Mega's 5GB or Pixeldrain's 10GB, I think for regular use for things like documents and digital art those are reasonable, but when it comes to porn games, which can be multiple GB, you could only manage to download like 1 or 2 before hitting the cap on Mega, PIxeldrain is more reasonable but you can manage only about 2 or 3 or 4 big games. The rest of the file hosting sites are just bad with a few exceptions but most of them are either painfully slow or only let you download if you are a "premium user".

In the future if games keep getting bigger I think we'd soon reach a point where we'd have to download a 12+GB game in one go just to play it.
Another thing I want to bring up is how some games are like 3 or 5GB yet have deceptively little content to explain that size, I can't think of any games at the top of my head right now but I have definitely encountered this over the last 5 years of playing lewd games. Its almost as if devs are fluffing up the game size with unused or placeholder assets to make it seem like the big size means would suggest there is a lot of playable/viewable content but that never seems to be the case.

That's all for my thoughts but I'm curious to see what you all think?

 

[Croc cat]

For most Renpy games the size comes from the images and for some new devs who render stuff at 4k that means increased game size. There are those who compress the images to keep the overall game size accessible and there are those who don't.
The best way to fix this issue is simply releasing the game in a compressed state and give the full quality images as an "dlc" option. That's my opinion of course

 

[Soniram]

As a developer, it's a constant struggle. In anything I make, I want to keep the size under 4 GB. There's plenty of ways to go about this, but as Croc cat said, the biggest bloat comes from images/videos/animations. A single 1920 image, even with webp, can go over 1 MB in size if the colors and shading are of high quality.

Compression can help. Using sprites on backgrounds can help. Other 'tricks' can help. There are some other file types that should be showing up soon that will compress file sizes even more.

If you're running into a 0.1 or other low version game that is close to 3-4 GB, the developer really needs to fix stuff. I don't know of one developer that would want to bloat the size of their project. It's actually a matter of pride to pack as much content into as little space as possible. From my standpoint, quick downloads with lots of content would draw in more players.

 

[anne O'nymous]

[...] I have to wonder is anyone else starting to get concerned with how big these games are getting size wise.

Hmm, could it be the reason why game compressors exists, and why so many people are asking for a compressed version ?

Now I don't really have a problem waiting a few hours to download something, the bigger concern are these file-hosting sites that most free ones have data caps like Mega's 5GB or Pixeldrain's 10GB, [...]

The biggest concern is for members (mostly US based) who have a weekly/monthly bandwidth limit. The others can perfectly use a download manager to deal with the speed, and diverse the hosts to deal with the data limits.

The rest of the file hosting sites are just bad with a few exceptions but most of them are either painfully slow or only let you download if you are a "premium user".

Except Anonfiles, that is variable depending where you are, and uploadheaven that is really slow, most authorized hosts are reliable.

In the future if games keep getting bigger I think we'd soon reach a point where we'd have to download a 12+GB game in one go just to play it.

It already exist, there's few games that are available in chunks due to their size. But strictly speaking it's only a concern when the games are still WIP.

 

[VMiller]

Compressing images does not solve the problem drastically, the file sizes are not reduced very much.
As a beginner I do not understand one thing. Why people are still using file-sharing sites to distribute game files, while the rest of humanity has been using torrents and similar technologies for years?

 

[Soniram]

Compressing images does not solve the problem drastically, the file sizes are not reduced very much.
As a beginner I do not understand one thing. Why people are still using file-sharing sites to distribute game files, while the rest of humanity has been using torrents and similar technologies for years?

Torrents would work for large games, and there might very well be people out there seeding them. For a smaller game/dev/project, they're better served by file-sharing sites that don't require seeds and leeches so players can access and download them at any time at (relatively) functional speed.

 

[TessaXYZ]

No one is intentionally fluffing up their game sizes. They just aren't compressing their images.

Compressing images does not solve the problem drastically, the file sizes are not reduced very much.

This is simply wrong. A 1920x1080 PNG can be 2-4 MB. Compressed to a webp, it gets reduced by up to 95%, down to 100-300 KB.

 

[Cosy Creator]

Compressing images does not solve the problem drastically, the file sizes are not reduced very much.

Have to disagree with this. Take the following image as an example. It's roughly mid sized as my renders go, nothing crazy going on, but not a load of darkness to reduce the file size.

As a raw 4k PNG it's 11.1MB

At 1080p:
As a lossless webp it's 1.81MB
As a lossy webp at 95% quality it's 455kb (This is what I do my desktop versions at)
As a lossy webp at 80% quality it's 135kb (This is what I do my android versions at)

So even comparing the 95% version to the losless 1080p version, I've saved about 75% of the space, and considering I've got thousands of these renders that adds up to a hell of a lot, and there are games with many more renders than mine out there.

 

[baneini]

Devs need to accept that people are fine with lower res compressed images. I never felt like I'm missing out by dling the lowest file size option, the idea comes across just fine in 720. The initial render being grainy is way worse.
Adopt practices like having each image be maximally informative and useful, some devs just have a lot of pictures that do nothing because they don't care, maybe its to distract from the fact the dialogue isn't very good. Simply have more dialogue per frame as a directive, do some sort of zoom in and out to make it visually interesting.

The worst practise of all time is forcing the player to DL several GB of images they already have from dling a previous version of a game. Make an update only patch, and not only from last update but maybe 3-4 updates ago. Section the game into part 1, part 2, whatever. I never understood the friction of being able to drop in new image files into an existing folder as if its arcane magic.

If you make a 3dcg game and you really have hard time compressing the data having a torrent available might be the only option. 3d is usually pretty awful with these single dev titles to begin with and seeing 10gb size with only mega dl options makes people straight up ignore the title.

 

[Meaning Less]

As a beginner I do not understand one thing. Why people are still using file-sharing sites to distribute game files, while the rest of humanity has been using torrents and similar technologies for years?

Because file sharing services don't rely on seeders, they also tend to be more reliable if your goal is to serve several hundred people downloading at the same time as it happens here.

But if you prefer torrents you can check

You must be registered to see the links

.

 

[The Lewd Gamer]

Now I don't really have a problem waiting a few hours to download something, the bigger concern are these file-hosting sites that most free ones have data caps like Mega's 5GB or Pixeldrain's 10GB, I think for regular use for things like documents and digital art those are reasonable, but when it comes to porn games, which can be multiple GB, you could only manage to download like 1 or 2 before hitting the cap on Mega, PIxeldrain is more reasonable but you can manage only about 2 or 3 or 4 big games.

For me personally I have close to little problem with MEGA's 5GB cap. And this is my opinion, of course, but: I am willing to wait a day to play a game if I am interested in it. See, I've been around for a while now and developed a pattern to try out games; knowing they'll take long to download I just click on the MEGA link and play some other thing until the next night. My main problem (as you probably have guessed) is when the MEGA link is down or there is none, I just avoid these games knowing my shitty internet will probably make the browser interrupt the download. Also, if the game is small enough (less than 300MB) I just download using any other cloud service so as to not take from the 5GB from MEGA.

In the future if games keep getting bigger I think we'd soon reach a point where we'd have to download a 12+GB game in one go just to play it.

And about this, yes. It concerns me, my complex downloading system is not designed for like 3 days of wait . No, but seriously, rn I just don't like having to wait to play a game and then find out it has so little/low quality content. And if that wait is going to do nothing but increase it does bother me. On the other side (and to look at the bright side of things), I really like seeing the adult gaming industry grow, and many of these bigger sized games are that big because they put effort into making them and include many different assets apart from hq images (like sounds and music). A great example is Wild Life, that game is around 12GB (damn), but it has smooth animations, great textures/renders, some sounds, lacks music though (at least last time I played), but nice gameplay. Again, I don't mind waiting if it turns out to be a good game.

TL;DR: I have no problem if the wait is worth it.

 

[Soniram]

The worst practise of all time is forcing the player to DL several GB of images they already have from dling a previous version of a game. Make an update only patch, and not only from last update but maybe 3-4 updates ago. Section the game into part 1, part 2, whatever. I never understood the friction of being able to drop in new image files into an existing folder as if its arcane magic.

This is because of archiving, which is done for any number of reasons whether it's a good idea or not.

 

[McFuckyy96]

A lot of my concerns would be fixed if there was an option like steam but for porn/lewd games, on steam I don't mind downloading large games or waiting a few hours for a DL to finish because there are no download or bandwidth caps, like the other day I had a 10GB patch for Lost Ark, took about 45mins to download and I didn't have install a whole new version of the game to do it.
I would use steam for that but the censorship and genre of games i like would never be available on there.

And I'm glad devs are putting so much effort and time into these projects for them to be filled with so much high quality art but its also a pain downloading the same game over and over again every update, I only tend to use Mega and Pixeldrain because they have fast speeds but if I want to download something more than 5GB then Pixeldrain is my only option and not every game will have that as a DL option.

I really don't think there is any benefit going over 1080p, I doubt most people will care about the minor details they can or can't see on the textures as they're fapping. Unless the game is live-rendered in real time then I could see the reason for that, but the great majority of these VN are pre-rendered videos or 2D so the amount of detail gained wouldn't be worth it for how big the media files will be. I would rather devs focus on the stylisation and atmosphere of a game than focusing on realism and textures but that is just me.

 

[Soniram]

A lot of my concerns would be fixed if there was an option like steam but for porn/lewd games, on steam I don't mind downloading large games or waiting a few hours for a DL to finish because there are no download or bandwidth caps, like the other day I had a 10GB patch for Lost Ark, took about 45mins to download and I didn't have install a whole new version of the game to do it.
I would use steam for that but the censorship and genre of games i like would never be available on there.

And I'm glad devs are putting so much effort and time into these projects for them to be filled with so much high quality art but its also a pain downloading the same game over and over again every update, I only tend to use Mega and Pixeldrain because they have fast speeds but if I want to download something more than 5GB then Pixeldrain is my only option and not every game will have that as a DL option.

I really don't think there is any benefit going over 1080p, I doubt most people will care about the minor details they can or can't see on the textures as they're fapping. Unless the game is live-rendered in real time then I could see the reason for that, but the great majority of these VN are pre-rendered videos or 2D so the amount of detail gained wouldn't be worth it for how big the media files will be. I would rather devs focus on the stylisation and atmosphere of a game than focusing on realism and textures but that is just me.

Another thing to keep in mind is, especially in this forum and genre of games/VNs, there are a lot of new and learning developers. I'm very much learning new tricks and tweaks. Your post and a couple above have given me some insights on player concerns which are quite relevant to my project and I'll be adjusting going forward.

The only way we learn is through communication. Thank you.

 

[Rafster]

That's been an issue that bothered me a lot as a player, and living in a crappy third world hole, my download speed/upload speed are slow as crap.

Most HTML games suffer from this. It's not rare to see real porn HTML games with 1.2 GB size and only 10 minutes of content. Then questions arise where this is coming from: just like Ren'py games: Bad image/video size management. They just include every gif/jpg/png they come across without even thinking on seeing how much they weight.

a 2-3 MB gif may not look like much, but multiply it from thousands you'll need in your game, and the size begins to pile up, badly. Many devs want the best HD looks, even 4K images/gifs, but that comes at a price: Size, even compressing to webp/webm/mp4 might not be enough.

 

[woody554]

I get the frustration, but VNs are still only around 10% of the size of other current games, which have been around 20-50GB for years now.

but you can always look for the compressed versions, it seems pretty much all VNs have some kind souls posting them in the game threads.

 

[NRFB]

I sometimes feel bad thinking about making people download my 400 something MB game (of which like 90% of the size is sound/music) but then I come across some random HTML gif collection game that is already 2 GB in version 0.0.2 and feel somewhat less bad.

 

[berny]

I don't understand why so few developers offer an "update only" patch. Compared to how much work it is to create a game, the effort for creating such a patch can't be that big.
Sure, there may be reasons why this isn't possible for every update, but such patches are so rare, I really don't get it.

 

[Meushi]

I don't understand why so few developers offer an "update only" patch. Compared to how much work it is to create a game, the effort for creating such a patch can't be that big.
Sure, there may be reasons why this isn't possible for every update, but such patches are so rare, I really don't get it.

Because depending on the engine & game structure there's some complexity in building & maintaining updates. Not all devs are necessarily familiar with diff tools etc. Which is why there's an thread for example.

Plus the dev has to build & upload whole game & patch each update, which obviously involves more time & effort.

Then there's the player base confusion. It's sadly common to see posts saying people don't know how to use the patch, or they broke something trying to install it.

 

[Count Morado]

Are game sizes becoming an issue? No.