Reminds me of the Crack.com interview with Jonathan Clark:
Adding to the difficulty of the task, our artist had no experience in the field. I remember in a particular level we wanted to have a dungeon. A certain artist begin by creating a single brick, then duplicating it several thousand times and building a wall out of the bricks. He kept complaining that his machine was too slow when he tried to render it. Needless to say this is not the best way to model a brick wall.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160125143707/http://www.loonyg...
GTA5 had well over 1000 people on its team.
When making a game, once you have something playable, is to figure out how to package it. This is included in that effort. Determining which assets to compress, package, and ship. Sometimes this is done by the engine. Sometimes this is done by the art director.
When I did this. My small team took a whole sprint to make sure that assets were packed. That tilemaps were made. That audio files were present and we did an audit to make sure nothing extra was packaged on disk. Today, because of digital stores and just releasing zip files, no one cares what they ship and often you can see it if you investigate the files of any Unity or Unreal engine game. Just throw it all over the fence.
Game studio's no longer care how big their games are if steam will still take them. This is a huge problem. GTA5 was notorious for loading json again, and again, and again during loading and it was just a mess. Same for HD2, game engines have the ability to only pack what is used but its still up to the developers to make sure their assets are reusable as to cut down on size.
This is why Star Citizen has been in development for 15 years. They couldn't optimize early and were building models and assets like it's for film. Not low poly game assets but super high poly film assets.
The anger here is real. The anger here is justified. I'm sick of having to download 100gb+ simply because a studio is too lazy and just packed up everything they made into a bundle.