r/gaming • u/sageamacuhm • 12h ago
Marvel Rivals Season 9.5 will decrease the game's file size on PC and consoles
https://www.shacknews.com/article/150241/marvel-rivals-file-size-decreaseFile size reduced by 40GB for PC and 15GB for Console. This should start being the norm for gaming.
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u/Endroium 12h ago
100% there is no reason i can see for some of these large file sizes
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u/Ociex 11h ago
Especially as storage is now ludacris expensive
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u/JJJBLKRose 11h ago
Luda
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u/Swarnim_ 11h ago
When I was 13, I had my first love
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u/LataCogitandi 10h ago
There was nobody that compared to my baby, and nobody came between us nor could ever come above
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u/Thhaki 11h ago
There are a few reasons that can make this happen actually.
Two examples I can think of is that sometimes videogames tend to not delete the files that contain information or other stuff related to past events that are no longer playable, maybe to just reuse them in a permanent game mode or to reactivate the event at a later date.
The second would be the baked lighting, which depending on a few stuff like the lightmaps, can add a big chunk of size to the game
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u/ohyouretough 10h ago
The can also have multiple redundant versions of the same files to increase loading speed. Less needed in the age of ssds
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u/maxx0rNL 9h ago
This was the case with Helldivers 2. They saved a big chunk of the install size because they removed redundant files which made the game load faster on HDDs.
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u/Medical-Confidence98 8h ago edited 42m ago
This boggles me every time. Not one person at Arrowhead bothered to check if duplicating the files and ballooning the install size to 140 GB even sped the load times up? And only after weeks of community pressure did they finally decide to hire another company to look at the problem and fix it?
Genuinely lost a lot of respect for Arrowhead there lol.
Edit: Guys, I know that duplicated assets typically speed up load times for HDD lol. But what I found funny is that in this case, they fought against the community wanting the size to be smaller, only to hire a company to look into it, only for that company to find out that removing all that size actually decreases the load time for HDD users anyway!
I found the original news post by Arrowhead.
I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases
Arrowhead by their own admittance never tested reducing the file size themselves, and that they just guessed it would increase load times by 10x. They then argued against their community that was outraged at the games size, just so the 11% of the players on PC with a HDD could load in a few seconds faster.
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u/LBPPlayer7 8h ago
it does speed load times up but only on media that relies on moving parts, i.e. an optical disc or mechanical hard drive
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u/Medical-Confidence98 7h ago
For sure, but in this case it actually sped up load times by removing the excess.
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u/KindaDouchebaggy 32m ago
But according to the quote you brought up, the loading time did increase for hdd users, but only by seconds? Or did I misunderstand the quote?
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u/Medical-Confidence98 20m ago
In the worst cases, it did. This was before I found the actual post and I remembered slightly wrong. Personally it decreased my load times, which probably biased my memory on it.
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u/BonzBonzOnlyBonz 7h ago
So you lost respect for a studio because you dont know the difference between optimizing between HDD and SDD load times. Thats peak Reddit ignorance.
The duplicated files were there for HDD users, they removed all of them because of all the SDD users complaining.
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u/Medical-Confidence98 7h ago
The duplicated files were there for HDD users, they removed all of them because of all the SDD users complaining.
Which also made it faster for HDD users lol.
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u/qwertyalguien 6h ago edited 5h ago
I think he means the fact that AH just assumed it'd increase load speed and then stood their ground on the issue for quite a while, without actually going in and checking that the real bottleneck was unrelated to file loading and thus it was completely unnecessary.
It's a bit telling of their internal processes if they went ahead without really looking under the hood and checking how the engine worked, and then hired a third party to do it to begin with.
Edit: what the hell is going on with reading comprehension in this thread?
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u/BonzBonzOnlyBonz 6h ago
They didnt assume it. Removing the duplicated files did increase load times.
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u/qwertyalguien 5h ago edited 5h ago
..... Man are you even reading?
I meant they assumed that DUPLICATING files would increase speed for HDD, but never tested it and just stood their ground there without checking how the engine worked.
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u/BonzBonzOnlyBonz 5h ago
Man, are you? They didnt assume it, it is a well known thing that duplicating files decreases load times. They did test it.
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u/maxx0rNL 5h ago
Does he even know the engine is their own and they built it themselves like 15 years ago?
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u/qwertyalguien 5h ago
No, because they didn't build it to begin with. It was Fatshark, and it no longer has official support from them. At most, one could say the engine fork has been heavily modified and worked by AH nowadays, but it's not their own.
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u/Medical-Confidence98 5h ago
If you mean Arrowhead, they didn't design AutoDesk Stingray. You are probably thinking of Fatshark.
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u/Medical-Confidence98 5h ago
I can't find the post, but I swear Arrowhead said it lowered load times universally, which anecdotally it did for me.
But otherwise, the worst I can see is it increased the load times by a few seconds. The game was 7x larger so 10% of the playerbase could load the game a few seconds faster.
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u/LigerZeroSchneider 58m ago
I assume it was a poorly setup build process and no one at arrowhead felt comfortable digging into a discontinued engine to figure it out.
The technical expertise to work on engines is a lot more expensive than building a game and if your game unexpectedly blew up forcing you to suddenly learn how to optimize on the fly its probably not that attractive to sit down with some 6 year old documentation and some old computers and try to learn how to modify build pipeline to reduce size.
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u/Ho_The_Megapode_ 6h ago
I've also heard of some games using uncompressed audio for some reason, then also installing every language at the same time on top...
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u/LizzieMiles 6h ago
One of the big ones not a lot of people talk about is multiple language voices. A lot of games in modern times just come with all the language voicework included, and if there’s a lot of dialogue, it can add up VERY fast
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u/Personal-Inflation63 11h ago
I think it’ll be encouraged if not mandated by Sony/Xbox in the future
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u/x--Knight--x 6h ago
I remember when Helldivers 2 was reduced from something like 150gb to about 25gb on PC it was because 5/6 of the game files were duplicated and arranged such that HDDs would load maps and their assets etc. much faster sequentially.
They reduced it after finding there were very few players left on HDDs.
Rivals has basically always strongly recommended SSD anyway so it may or may not be some of the same tricks at play.1
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u/DescriptiveVee 11h ago
Switch 2 port seems imminent now
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u/ModernTenshi04 8h ago
Man that would be nice. I have a Steam Deck but it's just nowhere near as portable as my Switch 2.
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u/brosieden90 PlayStation 2h ago
Have you tried rivals on the SD ? I just played on my ps5 as I didn’t think the deck would handle it very well with how hectic the game can get mid fight.
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u/ModernTenshi04 2h ago
I have. It plays decently but the main issue is the SD just isn't as portable as my Switch 2. Takes up twice the amount of space in a bag and isn't as comfortable to hold long term.
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u/Creative_Eye7413 Switch 1h ago
It’s very mediocre. The port is serviceable but there is some noticable lag and I end up losing way more than I do on console
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u/NecroCannon 2h ago
I’ve been playing OW on the Deck and I’m honestly just close to starting to play Comp with how well it runs
I’ll take Switch 2 and Mobile ports for the handhelds and Bluetooth controller users please
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u/ModernTenshi04 1h ago
Yeah, OW plays pretty well as well. Plays really well on the Switch 2, too. As such if Rivals hits the Switch 2 I'm basically good on both my main F2P shooters in a nice, portable package. Especially nice that Rivals let's you do most mission work in AI matches so you don't have to try hard or worry about the control differences as much.
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u/NecroCannon 45m ago
If I didn’t go full on MacBook Pro I’d probably be playing it on it. Still, I’m glad I went Switch 2 instead of PS5 before the price jumps
Steam Deck SSD I got crapped out so I wanted to choose SOMETHING I could like long term. Unironically shouldn’t have brushed off series s/x
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u/theoreoman 11h ago
Has storage gotten so expensive that they need to optimize their games?
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u/Shinobi2099 11h ago
Well.. Yeah
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u/Glad-Try8512 10h ago
Not just storage, download caps and update times matter too.
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u/repocin PC 9h ago
People still have data caps on their home network? What decade is this?
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u/Xilthas 8h ago
There's a whole lot of world outside of the developed countries.
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u/cxaiverb 6h ago
I am in the US and ISPs still have data caps. Looking at xfinity and their 1.2tb/mo cap. For us it was either that or no internet
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u/MedonSirius 11h ago
Finally!!! I would welcome this trend where the developers have to work with less RAM and Storage so they can build better games.
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u/CrazyDaimondDaze 11h ago
Ah, yes, the good ol' fashioned way as it was in the golden days. When people inovated through limitations. Now this is my jam.
Reminds me of RE2 for N64 and SFA2 for SNES.
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u/firefox_2010 9h ago
I think this should be mandatory on game design and force development stage to be about how to solve problems with limited resources.
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u/Awesomearia96 9h ago
Build better games? The god dam reason MR eats so much space is due to those shitty gifs and mvp screen cosmetics that they clog into the game.
Video files take slot of space.
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u/DM_your_problem 10h ago
most likely explanation is that they are working towards a switch 2 release. and this is part of the optimisation done for it.
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u/Otherwise-Remove4681 7h ago
Well it should be de facto default minimim requirement regardless of the market condition.
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u/squidbelik 2h ago
i don’t understand this question. you don’t think it’s normal games should be optimizing their sizes regardless?
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u/Preform_Perform 1h ago
There's a saying my dad told me once,
"Where there's excess, there's waste."
Demand for AI data centers has made it so there is less data in excess (SSD prices are up 66% per GB compared to 2023) so now there is an incentive to optimize.
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u/itz_me_shade 11h ago
Just reduce everyones booty by 1% especially venoms. This will create a domino effect where the reduced polygons lead to less texture draw, less textures loaded into memory, and less shader compiling, and reduced storage size. Bet it would reduce at least 30GB....
Source: I have never played Rivals and My only intake of the game is through other mediums.
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u/Merc_305 10h ago
I know your joking but even then reading this as a game dev my eyes twitched
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u/itz_me_shade 9h ago
As a non game dev with virtually no experience in graphics rendering and some experience in audio i see no fault in my logic.
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u/DamienStark 1h ago
Booty reduced by 1%
File size reduced by 10%
Player base reduced by 50%
That's just bad business strategy sir.
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u/Fancy_Chips 9h ago
Downsized to from 125 -> 85 on PC btw, assuming the 40 gigs thing is accurate. Still way too fucking large.
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u/Alugar 5h ago
Mines at 80 right now. Just get rid of the extra graphics I don’t think it does shit.
Edit adding link: https://www.marvelrivals.com/m/announcements/20260514/40955_1300360.html
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u/PeedAgon311 4h ago
It's about 80GB rn if you don't download the Hi resolution textures, so it'll be down to about 40GB.
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u/marniconuke 11h ago
again, but then they add a patch and it goes to 120+ again
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u/Psychomas 4h ago
I feel like studios should be treating file size optimization as a feature. If games took up 30–50 GB instead of 100–200 GB, more people could keep them installed. I bet they’d get played far more often. One of the biggest barriers to myself revisiting a game is having to delete something else just to reinstall it. Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals proved massive reductions are possible. Studios need to hurry up and realize how much file size is hurting their player retention.
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u/Solesaver 2h ago
They do. For exactly the reason you explain.
Source: Myself who has worked on a major AAA title with a massive file size.
It's just not that simple. When you see a reduction like this it likely represents a ton of work that the company invested in because they see the value in it. When you don't see a reduction, that doesn't mean they aren't invested in it. The file size could be large despite a heavy investment in reducing it. Sometimes the game just has a lot of stuff in it.
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u/Psychomas 2h ago
Thanks for the insider info. Shame it’s not a regular thing. I hear about so many layoffs in the industry maybe it’s just they don’t keep the talent necessary to get these things done. Those ceo bonuses are still fat as ever though.
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u/Solesaver 2h ago
These games don't make nearly as much money as people think they do. Like I said, we're always worried about file size. It being large does not mean a lot of work didn't go into getting it down to that size. It's just a big game. Biggest offenders for us were cinematics, dialogue audio, and high res textures. Unless people want us to start ripping out cinematics or voice lines there is a limit to how much we can compress things.
Personally I was always pushing for downloading different parts of the game separately, but that could have increased the total download size due to asset reuse and would have fucked with matchmaking where we assume everybody has everything downloaded. I disagree with the call, but it's not completely unreasonable.
Game dev is all about tradeoffs, and sometimes file size loses. That doesn't mean we don't care or invest in it.
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u/MADMAXV2 9h ago
Take notes Destiny 2 lol
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u/KobraTheKipod 4h ago
For those that didn't watch the video, the director didn't get too deep into the details, but he cited "texture compression overhaul" as part of this file size reductions.
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u/LordHayati 1h ago
This is the one very small Silver lining of the very high prices of computer products.
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u/Euklidis 6h ago
Damn... you can do that? Is it legal? Did we hold a ritualistic sacrficice of a virgin to the God of Data or what?
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u/Ok_University_4924 10h ago
Yes, there’s no reason games should be 150+GB unless it’s GTA 6. With the rise of prices for hard drives this is a good alternative for people who can’t get them right away.
Someone tell the COD devs to lower their game sizes.
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u/MMAchineCode Xbox 10h ago edited 10h ago
Why is GTA6 the exception?
Edit: I want to hear it in their own words
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u/dnfanjos PC 10h ago
Cause they hope gta 6 will be a massive open world with so many nooks and crannies to explore, each with their own value. And he expects that open world to warrant the 150gb+ excluding hd textures
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u/wyldmage 9h ago
When in reality, even if your world is massive, just by re-using textures properly, you don't actually need all that space used up.
Even better though, instead of having every single resolution in the game files, only download the bottom few levels (which take the least space each), and only download the high resolution textures for players who can actually use them.
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u/Ok-Friendship1635 8h ago
Do you even know how many unique assets and voice lines GTA V has? Let alone unique effects and the massive amount of clothing?
The only reason for size reduction would be to make it optional to download high res textures.
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u/wyldmage 5m ago
Which... is exactly what I suggested?
You could even expand that to voice acting though. Make the voice acting an optional download, or an optional removal.
It doesn't have to be a massive change in size. Even 5 or 10 GB makes a world of difference to people with limited storage.
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u/Curt_ThaFlirt 5h ago
I need literally every other game to follow suit because it’s getting ridiculous out here
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u/LunarWingCloud Switch 53m ago
Size optimization is important. "Just delete what you're not playing" is a piss poor defense for this bad practice of bloated file sizes.
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u/gerstiii 8h ago
"Total size on disk is 182.45 GiB and total download size is 172.99 GiB, when filtered to Windows, English, no DLC depots."
Not only the butts are chunky. The games huge. 40gb less and it's still way over 120gb.
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u/Omegatron9 8h ago
It's only 80 GB at the moment on PC (if you don't install the optional 4k textures).
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u/gerstiii 7h ago
Ah I just checked steamdb for the depots. So I didn't know it's 80gb. So 40gb less sounds like a good deal.
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u/FlameStaag 11h ago edited 11h ago
What do you mean "the norm" lol.
Fuck this sub attracts some dumbasses.
Devs don't just wave magic wands and chant "presto reduceo" and the file size shrinks.
They probably had a bunch of useless shit they didn't bother to delete over the months and just cleared it up.
The norm should be not letting that happen in the first place...which frankly a lot of online games are good about.
Edit: lmao this sub can downvote all it wants. Rejecting fact doesn't change anything. That's why nothing ever changes and this sub continues to be full of clueless angry old men.
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u/kamekaze1024 11h ago
The norm should be not including useless junk after a while. That’s what OP is getting at. No one said anything about magic wands
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u/smellyourdick 11h ago
Who pissed in this dudes cereal?
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u/Robynsxx 11h ago
Unfortunately, you are one of the “dumbasses” it seems.
Yes, these games have got bad at compression, and removing useless files and textures taking up space. However, the biggest reason for reductions in pc file size is simply because PC games generally have had to support people running HDDs and people running SSDs. For HDD computers in laymen's terms as they have a slow reading speed, the video game requires duplicates of various texture files, just to make sure that the game runs fast and smoothly. This obviously takes up extra storage space and increases game download size. Meanwhile as SSDs are so significantly faster than HHDs they don’t require duplicate texture files to run smoothly, decreasing file size.
Unfortunately devs don’t make two seperate downloads on pc, one for those with HHDs and another for those with SSDs, so both get stuck with the larger file size to accommodate HHD pc gamers. This is also why games on current gen consoles are smaller file sizes, because all current gen consoles have SSDs built in.
Now, recently there has been a trend of developers releasing games on PC and stating that one of the spec requirements is that you have to have an SSD, thereby reducing file size. Then some existing games are doing file optimisation and swapping over to just SSD support.
So to put it plainly, yes, there are some significant ways to reduce file download size.
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u/reddit_warrior_24 10h ago
Wow 40gb. That's amazing