I want to comment that “duplicate textures” isn’t typically wastes a lot of space. It’s one thing, but not typically the biggest thing.
The biggest thing is really unnecessarily high-definition textures, as you already said. If you have 4K textures for everything, that means you roughly use 5 MB per asset, even when using compression. If you have 2000 of these assets in your game, you immediately need 10 GB or storage space, and RAM when they are loaded into memory, and that’s what makes the game so heavy.
Just to make a counter-example, Luanti, which is like open-source Minecraft, uses 64x64 pixel assets at the most, where each asset consumes less than 1 KB of storage space if compressed, and that’s why even using a thousand assets in the game or more, the total game size is less than 30 MB. And that literally contains the whole game, including all assets and logic, which is just as complex as proprietary Minecraft.
It isn’t the biggest thing but it’s one example of space saving that isn’t done out of laziness. Obviously it’s easy to not do it in the drafting and design phase but it really should be optimized after the fact. No the big space wasters are the duplicate video scenes for higher resolutions that may or may not be used. The 2K and 4K videos waste a lot and that’s a big drawback if they aren’t ever going to be used if say, the person doesn’t have a monitor that goes that high.
I want to comment that “duplicate textures” isn’t typically wastes a lot of space. It’s one thing, but not typically the biggest thing.
The biggest thing is really unnecessarily high-definition textures, as you already said. If you have 4K textures for everything, that means you roughly use 5 MB per asset, even when using compression. If you have 2000 of these assets in your game, you immediately need 10 GB or storage space, and RAM when they are loaded into memory, and that’s what makes the game so heavy.
Just to make a counter-example, Luanti, which is like open-source Minecraft, uses 64x64 pixel assets at the most, where each asset consumes less than 1 KB of storage space if compressed, and that’s why even using a thousand assets in the game or more, the total game size is less than 30 MB. And that literally contains the whole game, including all assets and logic, which is just as complex as proprietary Minecraft.
It isn’t the biggest thing but it’s one example of space saving that isn’t done out of laziness. Obviously it’s easy to not do it in the drafting and design phase but it really should be optimized after the fact. No the big space wasters are the duplicate video scenes for higher resolutions that may or may not be used. The 2K and 4K videos waste a lot and that’s a big drawback if they aren’t ever going to be used if say, the person doesn’t have a monitor that goes that high.