There was a thread here earlier this month,

> Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178

Section of the top comment says,

> It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

and the reply to it has,

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.

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viraptor 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There was also the GTA wasting minutes to load/parse JSON files at startup. https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

And Skylines rendering teeth on models miles away https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17gfq13/the...

Sometimes the performance is really ignored.

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ux266478 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's not how it works. The demand for engineering hours is an order of magnitude higher than the supply for any given game, you have to pick and choose your battles because there's always much, much more to do. It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch, without sacrificing load times at the altar or visual fidelity, particularly given the state the rest of the game was in. Who the hell has time to do that when there are crashes abound and the network stack has to be rewritten at a moments notice?

Gamedev is very different from other domains, being in the 90th percentile for complexity and codebase size, and the 99th percentile for structural instability. It's a foregone conclusion that you will rewrite huge chunks of your massive codebase many, many times within a single year to accomidate changing design choices, or if you're lucky, to improve an abstraction. Not every team gets so lucky on every project. Launch deadlines are hit when there's a huge backlog of additional stuff to do, sitting atop a mountain of cut features.

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swiftcoder 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> It's not bizarre that nobody verified texture storage was being done in an optimal way at launch

The inverse, however, is bizarre. That they spent potentially quite a bit of engineering effort implementing the (extremely non-optimal) system that duplicates all the assets half a dozen time to potentially save precious seconds on spinning rust - all without validating it was worth implementing in the first place.

	▲	MBCook 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Was Helldivers II built from the ground up? Or grown from the v1 codebase? The first was on PS3 and PS4 where they had to deal with spinning disks and that system would absolutely be necessary. Also if the game ever targeted the PS4 during development, even though it wasn’t released there, again that system would be NEEDED.
	▲	rovr138 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes. They talk about it being an optimization. They also talk about the bottleneck being level generation, which happens at the same time as loading from disk.

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kibwen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> They’re not the ones bearing the cost. Customers are.

I think this is uncharitably erasing the context here.

AFAICT, the reason that Helldivers 2 was larger on disk is because they were following the standard industry practice of deliberately duplicating data in such a way as to improve locality and thereby reduce load times. In other words, this seems to have been a deliberate attempt to improve player experience, not something done out of sheer developer laziness. The fact that this attempt at optimization is obsolete these days just didn't filter down to whatever particular decision-maker was at the reins on the day this decision was made.