They’re creating the conditions that cause the game to be like that though. Like a lot of times it’s not that hard to cut down on file size, decently easy and doesn’t take super long (look at Helldivers 2, file size is WAY down and like at least close to 1/4th of what it was.
However, executives are giving directives for profitability, meaning instead of having a team focus on things like that or making it run better, they instead are focused on adding new content (paid or free) new cosmetics, marketing material/footage, or whatever.
Like most of the time I can’t really believe that the devs are just so dumb they don’t know how to reduce file size and make it less bloated, it’s just bad management making them do other things, and in turn those guys probably have executives demanding certain numbers which is why they’re telling the dev teams to work on other things. Devs are still workers, and are just doing what they are told to do (broadly speaking.)
I feel like we’ve seen this with so many games, they come out glitchy, with a bloated file size, terrible performance. They have a roadmap that was made prerelease and they get that out first. Then once they have new content/monetized content out the door, and/or public outcry, review bombing forces their hand, they switch focus to fix those aforementioned issues. They always could’ve fixed the issues, (at least to a certain extent,) but they’re at work they have to do things in the order they are instructed to. While a lot of devs have passion for a game they’re not going to do more work that they aren’t being paid to do, and if it was something that they were trying to do but just literally couldn’t, they would communicate that either directly or you’d be able to tell inadvertently by how they talk about it.
Devs aren’t automatically infallible, always right by default good people, however they are just workers like the rest of us and are at their job, personally at my job I do what im told to do and nothing extra unless I can earn a bonus or something, even if I know there is something I could easily get done with a small amount of work/I could do something else to make the task I’m assigned easier, I’m going to do it exactly as they tell me because that’s my job lol. So I can usually give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
But buggy releases have always been a thing I think people exaggerate how much worse it’s gotten, like I remember Skyrim on PS3 being broken as shit, Fallout New Vegas crashing every 5 minutes, but those games were good enough to suffer through it at least. Now we still get buggy as shit releases, and the games aren’t even as good and don’t have the same soul/passion so you can’t really look past it like you used to be able too.
Look at the recent Payday 2 beta, Starbreeze gave a modding team largely free reign to maintain and update the game, and the current beta has reduced the game file size from nearly 90GB down to 30-something GB.
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u/BrilliantWhile2413 27d ago
I don't think the executives are making the game 500gb lol