But we're not talking about compressing data. Just not wasting storage by having duplicate data in there. And I fail to see how it is a user's problem when it's the developers who are introducing the issue to begin with. If you are sold a product with an easily fixable problem from factory, you don't take it accept the fault as your own. I got 4TB of total storage, but i struggle severely with storage between all the car and flight sims with mods, multiplayer games with massive installs, and enormous single player games.

> Sucks to be told you fell behind, but guess what, you did! Just like 5 GB used to be enough, then 50, then 100.... Guess what, you want all those fancy videos and cutscenes and graphics? Oh shit, they take space. Omg. We are literally in a comment thread about how fancy graphics don't need to take up 100+ GB. Like, come on dude.

Well that specific hack sounds like it would be trivial to check for server side...

Read the article before making assumptions. It's nothing to do with the artists. They were deliberately duplicating all of their data to speed up load times for mechanical disks. Based on industry standard assumptions, they thought this was necessary. The article goes more into why it wasn't actually necessary after all. But it was nothing to do with the efficiency of their models and textures.

And it turned out that the slower load on HDD wasn't nearly as bad as they thought it would be.

Never forget: 

Okay, this is insane, and insanely good. Insane that they're using 5x the amount of space needed, and good because now I can forever leave the game installed in case a friend asks me to play, and won't have to worry about losing 16~% of my 1tb ssd for games.

What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s. NVME drives do **at least ten times that** for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.

My Genshin install on PC would be ~115 GB (in practice it's more bc I have an extra voice pack), while the same game on mobile is allegedly ~30 GB

Yes but then takes 17 straight hours to decompress a 30gb game during install.

I know they are. For something like database work, they're amazing. Now go an look at some game load time benchmarks. Because I can guarantee you they're *nowhere near* that much faster for 99% of games. Once you get off spinning rust, CPU speed remains the number one factor in load times. Because nearly everything is compressed and has to be unpacked and processed into the right formats by the system before it can be used. Picking whatever comes up at the top from googling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeS88O4rWB8 Just scanning though that video I can see the biggest difference is like a second. DirectStorage was supposed to be able to make game loading faster on faster SSDs, but as far as I can see that hasn't really happened. The PS5 does actually get noticeably slower if you cobble a slower drive into it, although not really enough to break anything. The decompression units in that hardware are actually pretty good, and can keep up with the faster SSDs.

And they talk about how it's seconds different for hdd users with the tiny size lol

Holy shit, ok I'll state it yet again and then I'm done. For the 3rd time, this isn't about who can afford what drives or who has what drives or what drives exist in our universe. Pretend drives doesn't exist if that is easier because the drives don't matter. Drive space is a symptom of the underlying issue. This is about the near universal trend of software companies destroying a decade plus of hardware performance gains because they refuse to properly optimize their software. Full stop. Anything else is a side effect of not properly optimizing things. The drive type arguments, drive space arguments...they disappear once the fundamental issue (optimization) is addressed. Holding these companies accountable is how this gets fixed. It's how this particular instance got fixed. This thread wouldn't even exist if these weren't legitimate complaints because the devs wouldn't have bothered with this round of size reduction if there wasn't a problem affecting their bottom line.

The much faster speeds of NVMe drives is often dictated by the smart use of caching. Once the cache runs out, the benefit is gone. In games specifically, NVMe drives were repeatedly shown on par or a little bit faster than SATA SSDs. There are workloads where NVMe drives boost performance dramatically. Gaming, however, isn't one of them.

It wasn't unnecessary, according to their knowledge at the time. They even wrote that in a [previous post](https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/553850/announcements/detail/543369627969783287) and referred to that information in this post. Seems like you didn't read either and just decided to get angry.

The problem I see with it is that we've gone the full circle. First games loaded slow on HDDs, but SSDs solved it. Then, seeing how SSDs are faster, game developers decided they could fit more read/write operations. Now games load slow on SSDs.

>A 4TB HDD currently costs more than it did a decade ago. What the fuck are you on? That's RAM that's currently skyrocketing because of AI, you dipshit. I just bought a 12 TB HDD for $250. Memory is the cheapest it's ever been and has always been on a downward decline like that. You don't know what you're talking about.

So you get racist af to prove your point? Fuck off twat and stop being a bitch. It's not unreasonable to put money into your hobby. That's what you do. You buy a game here and there, and you upgrade your hardware. What you don't do is bitch and moan that you can't keep up when the effort to do so isn't that much and at the end of the day, no one *owes* you AAA games. Cry harder. It's shit like this that makes gamers look like entitled bitches. You have it vastly better than any other time and you still take most of your time to bitch and moan.

In the case of Mario it's a smart way of handling the limited data available, its not a duplicate texture like Helldivers, its the same cloud copy pasted just with a different color. From what I understand Helldivers had the same files duplicated multiple times so that HDD could find them easily (somehow)

Ahh yes, the same approach I have to script development: multiple files, in different places, for different platforms, all with the same code!