I mean, zipping files in an archive and presenting them as a file is an ancient tradition in video games. For example Warcraft 3 used the MoPaQ archive to store data in .w3x file.

And Starcraft 2 data is just bunch of XML files.

Except MoPaQ weren't zips IIRC, they had their own clever format here - at least the OG StarCraft / SCBW MoPaQs were, playing with that is what I learned binary data handling on :). The idea of zipping data files applies, of course (and many a game used a literal ZIP with custom extension).

But there's one material difference between StarCraft/Warcraft and Gimp: in Blizzard games, those were "zips" of heavy data files, notably read only data blobs. The game would read them, unpack in memory, and serve appropriately. Most of that data was key-value, text resources, or flat assets - images, sfx. With Gimp, we're talking highly structured data that's continuously being mutated. Very much not the best representation for that, even if you're just persisting it. They're only getting away with this because of SSDs - on spinning rust, you'd feel this.

(Also worth noting that, at least in StarCraft/SCBW, most of the files inside were custom, well-optimized binary formats. This predated the XML insanity of encoding data with 90%+ markup overhead.)

Cool, I didn’t know that! But makes a lot of sense.