Now afaik some modern games dont even try to optimize their file sizes which leads to call of duty games being fucking massive.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
45 points (100.0% liked)
Games
21160 readers
190 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
- No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
- Anti-Edelgard von Hresvelg trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/games and submitted to the site administrators for review. :silly-liberator:
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah turns out when you had to ship your game on physical media because the internet didn't exist or was slow as hell, you had to work within limitations.
Didn’t someone at Activision admit they do this on purpose so you download fewer games by their competitors?
The Peter Griffin skin
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Uncompressed or minimally compressed high resolution textures is my hypothesis. Back in the PS2 era when most games could fit on a 4.7GB DVD, the highest resolution textures you'd get was 512x512. A total of 262 144 pixels. These days, highest resolution texture is probably 4096x4096. 16 777 216 total pixels. 64x more pixels. Modern textures also store more colour information. While image compression formats and algorithms have improved significantly in 20 years, there's only so much that can be done without reducing image quality. No one wants to see compression artifacts on their giant 4k TV or 4K monitor inches from their face after spending a small fortune on a video game (fortnite is free to play, but you get the general idea).
fortnite is free to play
They make all their money from purely cosmetic microtransactions, so it's probably even more relevant
The first aspect is obviously rushed development. Developers and artists can absolutely take some time to make games run smoothly with smaller assets. On the contrary, to complete a game as fast as possible you can employ many time-saving tricks that waste ungodly amounts of resources like duplicating a ton of stuff ect
Secondly, compressing files to make them smaller on the disk increases loading times, and on a capitalist standpoint it's a way better choice to not compress anything because preying on impulsive playing is more important than making your game easier to try since the dominant economic model is to milk your existing playerbase rather than trying to expand it
to fit all the bad inside
All the stuff other people said plus the fact that fortnite is a "main game" and so wants to be large enough that the average consumer can't have many other main games on their system.
If you have to uninstall fortnite to try the new ballefield you're less likely to do so
That is like, some evolutionary shit right there. Like when spiders break off their "penises" inside their partner so that she can't mate with anyone else for a while until she gets it out.
It's like the gym membership that you have to cancel in person after an exit interview. Add obstacles to leaving, no matter how minor, and you retain a chunk of people out of convenience.
"Fortnite is like a spider breaking its penis inside their partner" is truly one of the takes I've seen on this website lmfao
Thank you! :D. I wonder if this is tagline material!
I've played literally every conceivable game mode in Counter Strike: Source except the main one endlessly and had as such acquired in at the latest 2009 literally every copyright infringement skin, spray, map and voice line you could get and it wasn't like that.
if i had to guess two things: 1. big battle royale maps need huge sizes, almost all battle royale games are over 100 GB 2. skins and other assets used in promotions. lots of them. stored in high quality for high end users and uncompressed to decrease load times.
fortnite has been going on for 8 years i think and in each season there have been at least one or two promotion or crossover events, and a shit ton of skins (which were more than they could show on their storefront so they could cycle the skins into and out of the shop to create a FOMO effect). it just adds up in the 40 seasons or so fortnite has been running. and there is no end in sight so get ready to break the 200 GB barrier in a year or two.
The OG world of Warcraft map is much, much bigger than Fortnite, there's a ton more skins of weapons, armor, enemy sprites, etc, and the OG install is probably <15GB.
you cannot compare uncompressed 4k textures with probably compressed 720p textures, they are orders of magnitude bigger in size. and the OG wow map pre flight is basically a bunch of valleys carved with mountains there are massive gaps in the map geometry (it's still big though just not as big).
Fortnite is a cartoonish style, low-res game. I can compare the textures if they look comparable to my eye
old + live service + full of crossover bullshit = thousands upon thousands of texture and audio files, the heap of shit doesn't just grow, it accelerates each year as the devs settle in and churn out content faster and crossovers become more common, and "fuck it, storage is denser and cheaper than when we launched" becomes an increasingly comfortable excuse to not compress everything
Especially when it’s someone else paying for that storage. It’s like all of the video ads on the internet using up everyone’s mobile data.
Games just keep increasing in fidelity, but it's all done at the development stage instead of being algorithmically generated at runtime, so you get giant, complex geometries and textures that bake in a bunch of algorithms performed during development (like generating terrain or noisy textures or whatever). It takes a long time for that to shift to runtime. And storage is "cheap" right now so they don't care.
capitalist mutual aid by making system requirements so ludicrous that they can sell more expensive hardware to treatlerlite consoomers. As part of this mutual aid, they also enforce brutal crunch times on their replaceable proletariat who will get laid off after the next battle pass.
Play indie games, play retro games, pirate everything.
Toofbrush
Fortnite is an absurdly big platform now. I have it installed for playing with younger family members sometimes and it's now multiple full games (a huge Rock Band clone with hundreds of songs, a full racing game, the original wave-based game, the main battle royale), over dozen game modes just by the developers a lot of which have their own maps weapons and more, thousands and thousands of skins and accessories and live service / shop shit, and then on top of all that there's maybe tens of thousands of other games built in their engine as it's become a huge garbage pile of user generated content games to rival Roblox. Throw in localisation, sound for all that, and stuff that doesn't even get used all the time like locations and designs for live events and concerts and it's an absurd amount of stuff. I'd argue a lot of it is junk, but it's kind of crazy how much stuff Fortnite 'is' now.
How / why is fortnite so big? I played it at a friend's place when it came out, thought it was very mediocre and would die off quickly (not what I like in an FPS) and then it just exploded in popularity. How much can you milk the "minecraft FPS battle royale" concept? The natural life cycle of this is that within 5 years it should have settled into a dedicated playerbase of maybe 300-1000 active players at any one time, clinging stubbornly to this game they love while everyone else has moved on because there's only so many times you can play minecraft fps
Is it made with unreal engine 5?