A typical source file for one of the games takes a handful of MB. So why do all the games require ~200 MB according to Steam? What about Choice of Games’ platform requires ~200 MB per game? For that matter, is it that hard to have the platform be downloaded only once, and have all the games execute from it separately? Or is the process of conversion from source to executable so horrendously inefficient as to increase necessary storage a hundredfold? Old-style text adventures ran just fine on computers that had far less than 200 MB of total storage space. Seriously, guys, hire some old-timer programmers who know how to use memory efficiently because you used to have to, to clean up your memory allocation.
On steam, I believe, it has something to do with the ‘Steam Redistributables’ or what they are called again.
On mobiles it also has to do with ads, I think. It is a bummer, but nothing to be rude about.
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Unless you’re using some linux distro that has very small requirements of space and ram, I can’t imagine anyone suffering for 200mb per game, neither on pc or phone.
It’s something on steam’s end.
I checked the games I have installed, and yeah, they’re all around 200MB on harddrive.
On mobile it had an error for a while where the game would start bloating each time you loaded it, which was weird. No idea how that happened.
But on steam, I think that has to do with something on steam’s end and how it handles things like CS
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I’m just guessing, but it’s probably because each game is shipped with with its own browser. If that’s really the case, there are ways to make it much lighter, like using Tauri instead, but that’s something only CoG can do.
The larger file sizes can be due to several factors, like assets, sound files, and the way modern engines package games. Each game might have its resources that contribute to the total size. As for the platform, I think it’s a balance between ease of updates and maintaining functionality.
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That makes sense. Also, I believe there must be some underground appliances, meta data and other unrelated to the game but necessary to the runtime environment of platform running under these apps …might simplify compatibility across different systems but does come at the cost of increased storage use.
I’d day the most of it is literally the engine. Every executable requires a lot more stuff than just the data it shows, if you want it to be self-contained and not force your users to install a bunch of dependencies (I wouldn’t want Steam force me to install random system-wide dev tools on my machine if I want to just play a game, thank you very much).
(I think it’s an Electron executable, since CS requires a Node server.)
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Yeah, exactly this. As far as I understood it’s the visual element of the application (electron and dependencies) that takes up space, while the actual games are ‘just’ txt files and some images (in terms of space, of course!).
However, you have to download everything for each title since they run as individual games in Steam, thus each one takes up to 200-250 MB. I think that’s not too bad given that you have all the framework that runs an application, plus with modern devices 200 MB shouldn’t be a real issue in terms of storage.
I mean, that’s hardly special? Every Ren’py game includes a separate portable Python. Every Unreal game includes a separate installation of Unreal engine. The only difference I can see here is that you can actually know how much the assets take space (and I repeat, assets size != executable size, you can’t even read text files without a separate executable).