this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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The thing about compression is you have to process it to decompress it. It may be benificial to people with limited bandwidth, or for peer-to-peer sharing, but it's probably better for most users for someone like Valve to share the uncompressed version. Bandwidth isn't the issue it used to be.
It also makes progressive updates harder. The best you can do is compress each update individually, not the whole package.
I'm aware that compression rates are a trade-off between space and processing time, and that there's some balance to be had. However, I don't see this balance from plenty commercial games; what I see instead is disregard.
Here's a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:
FitGirl will consistently pick the later option. And it would be fine if devs picked the former, or a middle ground... but they don't. Instead, often you get a 10 GiB file that takes 10 min to unpack, the worst of both worlds.
And it isn't just a matter of the compression algorithm. The developers also have the freedom to choose how they split files; but they often create 9001 files the size of an ant, that is going to hurt decompression times. (Paradox Interactive, I'm looking at you.)
Tagging @fiestorra@discuss.tchncs.de, as it addresses what they said too.
I don't know any that take a long time to unpack from developers. They do have to pre-compile shaders, but that's different. Maybe I just don't pay enough attention, or maybe it's just because I don't play many big budget games.
From the top of my mind, Europa Universalis 4. Even the base game takes ages to install, and I don't think it's just the Linux version.
Incidentally, I checked it in FitGirl's site, found EU5 instead, and she's complaining about the exact same thing:
I did play EU5 (and 4 ages ago) and didn't notice the issue. I guess I just don't pay attention to it.
I did because my older computer was a potato, so it was kind of obvious the game took a bit too long to install.