You’re comparing apples to oranges.

3D models vs. app code.

You will be hard pressed to find any Electron app that exceeds 200 MB in disk space. Most are ~50 MB. Overall in 2018 that is not a big concern.

In gaming, high definition graphics are going to result in massively larger files. That’s not going to change anytime soon and no gaming company will prioritize a small download over better graphics.

> You will be hard pressed to find any Electron app that exceeds 200 MB in disk space. Most are ~50 MB.

Huh? Looking at my applications folder right now:

Atom 1.31: 822mb

Daedalus 0.8: 265mb

Mist 0.9.2: 186mb

Neon 0.0.7: 180mb

Patchwork: 185mb

Riot 0.11.4: 160mb

VS Code: 193mb

The electron framework alone is 117mb on MacOS. Honestly, how many copies of that do I need?

If you have 20 such apps, you use 1% of your 250gb SSD (which is on the way low end) on redundant framework copies, with the benefit that the developer gets to test on the version of Electron you are running.

I don't understand why apps don't download an Electron runtime on launch and store it in a shared location. That way, if apps share a required runtime version, only one copy of that version runtime exists.

carlo by Google Chrome team

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

Yes I know, and the size of an Electron app versus a AAA game is sometimes 3 orders of magnitude in difference, which is why I pointed out that even a "small" app that's 100MB is still a lot to download on a limited speed connection.

50MB isn't a big of a concern until you realize high quality native app would do it in less than 5 and probably in less than 5% of RAM usage

>It's opinions like this that cause first day downloads for new games like Red Dead Redemption 2 to be 55GBs.

RDR2's size comes from media files (high-resolution textures, models, audio).

Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?

A lot of space in some recent games, truly a bizarre amount has been in some cases dedicated to uncompressed audio.

Given that most people can't tell the difference between high grade mp3 and uncompressed it seems likely that this could be something like mp3.

I suspected you meant lossless, but no, Titanfall literally did include 35GB of uncompressed audio. Their reason was to lower the CPU overhead from decompression, which sounds like nonsense to me.

> Pray-tell, what magic compression technique would you use to do better AND still support 4K textures?

How about downloading textures and movies on demand in the background when you enter new areas? It's not like all that stuff is required for the game to start.

Given 55GB of data and the internet speed the average person has, the fact that most users will ultimately need to load most data, and the fact that a huge mass of users will need the data on day one this seems like a bad strategy.

tbh I'd use configurable installer: download only these assets you'll be using at worst case allow us to set up everything with full version installed and then cleanup

Sure. For the price of increased complexity, you can get something going (and in fact some games do do that, e.g. WoW), but to be clear, you're still downloading 55GB of assets. The game isn't actually any smaller, which is what OP was complaining about.

Also, this is why the big console makers are investing in cloud-consoles.

Hey, that's not fair to RDR2! I actually bought it the day it came out because it _didn't_ have a huge day one patch. I think it was only about 4 GB, which is barely a blip on my ISP's arbitrary data cap. Fallout 76, however, had a patch that was larger than the disc itself, so that was an easy "pass" for me.

Edit: I just checked, and even now that they've added multiplayer to the game (which didn't come on the physical disk), the patch for a new installation of RDR2 is 8 GB. Meanwhile, Fallout 76 is 50 GB and COD:BO4 is 65 GB.