This is manipulation to sell more copies and nothing more.
…yes? People who make games do things to make their game appeal to people. Framing that as a negative or unusual is kind of weird. Literally everything any game developer does to make the game entertaining or appealing is “a manipulation to sell more copies”.
Bold of you to assume the data in save files is packed binary and not something like JSON where { “x”: 13872, “y”: -17312, “z”: -20170 } requires 40 bytes of storage.
It’s not really laziness. Storing as JSON solves or prevents a lot of problems you could run into with something bespoke and “optimally packed”, you just have the tradeoff of needing more storage for it. Even then, the increased storage can be largely mitigated with compression. JSON compresses very well.
The problem is usually what they’re storing, not how they’re storing it. For example, The Witcher (first one) has ~20MB save files. These are mostly a bespoke packed binary format, but contain things like raw strings of descriptions in multiple localisations for items being carried, and complete descriptors of game quests. Things that should just be ID values that point to that data in the game files. It also leads with like… 13KB of zero-padding for some reason.
The Star Fox-style roguelite whose dev refused to use AI voices to cut costs is adding an entire "anti-capitalist revenge" campaign about a cat-girl destroying AI (lemmy.today) angielski
Since the Link isn’t working for some:...
GOG will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st (support.gog.com) angielski
The gaming industry needs to become more like holywood
As games get bigger and become more cinematic (and more expensive), there will be studios that grow and grow and then make big layoffs in a lull....