Just for some information regarding game size or as some state “regular Unreal Engine size” as I love talking about these things.
Unreal Engine games aren’t necessarily larger than other engines, what makes it large is the textures sizes. Allot of times new developers will use “4k” textures for items that does not require it. Texture file sizes is directly relatable to the pixel size of that texture and not the texture’s compression. So even if I convert a 4k texture into a jpeg and compress the life out of it it’ll still be the same 4k file size when I import it into Unreal, so you need to reduce its pixel size to say “2k”. This does degrade the quality a bit, I guess that is why most just keep it “4K”.
To give you an idea, Project Blue Moon has over 1500+ items in game with at least 4500 textures as each item usually use at a minimum 3 textures per shader, before our initial optimization the game size was 72GB, it is now “only” 28GB. I must say it is a very delegate problem to solve because if you downsize the texture you cannot upscale it afterwards. How we solved this was by storing our original textures so should we require larger textures we have it readily available.
