File Size: No Longer An Issue?

[WaveRider]

I may have missed the memo on this one, but last I checked our games needed to be around the 5 - 15 mb range. Now I'm looking at the Big Fish top ten and the games there are ranging from 25 to 75 mb (averaging about 44 mb), and that's not counting the two "no demo" games that are over 300 mb.

Has high-speed internet become so common place among the casual game audience that we don't have to worry about file size anymore?

And why wasn't I told? Seriously, where was this stated? Are there any documents, white papers, or anything showing the numbers on this, or did these developers just decide to take a chance and it paid off?

[Jesse Hopkins]

Maybe now everybody will stop worrying so much about having high quality oggs in their game. Seriously, it sounds better at at least 128 kbps.

[sound app]

It has been my experience in the games I did for BFG (Titanic, Atlantis, Mystic Inn, etc...) or others, that the size was no longer such a big problem. Tens of thousand consumers showed that if they wanted a game, if it was appealing to them, they would gladly let the broadband work harder. And yes, for composers it means we can work with more decent sound qualities and bigger ogg.

[Twitchfactor]

Now, I'm pretty new to the indie scene, but have been doing games for some 20 years and the way I see it in the download space is this; memory is cheaper and more prevelant with most machines having at least an 80gb hd and many people even having 200gb hd's, the average consumer has no idea how "big" a game is, all they care about is "time". The time it takes to download and get into the game matters more than the actual size.

[princec]

Our next game's going to weigh in over 30 megs. How times have changed - only in 4 years too.

Cas :)

[esmelon]

File size can be an issue on portals, if game has low convertion rate and big size. But this depends on who will pay for network traffic. :)

[princec]

If a game has a low conversion rate... it won't be on portals.

Cas :)

[MrGoldfish]

Even if people could download at 100Mb per second i'd still aim to keep the size of my games as low as possible just to save bandwidth [read:money].

[princec]

Maybe in 2003 bandwidth used to actually cost money. Nowadays it's practically free. Heads out of the sand! Times have changed.

Cas :)

[Jack Norton]

I'm not so sure. Ok Italy sucks for broadband, but I know lot of people that still don't have fast internet connection.
I have ISDN, so for me <20mb is ok, but 75mb? I won't even download the demo...!

Useless talk anyway until there are statistics on how % of people are still on dialup...

[oNyx]

EU broadband penetration rate (July 2007)

http://www.heise.de/bilder/97403/0/1

Edit: Keep in mind that it doesn't reflect the broadband penetration rate for potential customers. Eg there will be always some people who could get a faster line, but decided against that, because the alternatives are cheaper for their usage. Like only a bit email and maybe a little bit browsing... they won't download anything regardless how small it is.

[1EyedJack]

There is a very good thread discussing this subject, with some stats from Reflexive:

Statistics on impact of download size (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=7024)

[Scorpio]

When we were about half way through the development of Build-a-lot, we figured the download was going to come in around 45 megs.

Since this was so much bigger than our previous games, we touched based with our bigger distribution partners to ask about max file size and everybody said that they don't even blink if the installer is under 50 megs.

-Scorpio

[hooble]

I guess nobody else here is making mobile Java games. I'm still stuck around 75KB. It sure would be strange to have an entire megabyte to play with...

[Sybixsus]

Maybe in 2003 bandwidth used to actually cost money. Nowadays it's practically free. Heads out of the sand! Times have changed.
Cas :)
They certainly have. Now all the major ISP's are calling it traffic shaping. Now you can pay for 20MB broadband and receive 2MB during peak hours if you actually try to use it. Yay for the changing times!

[Desktop Gaming]

There's supposed to be an investigation into UK broadband speeds going on (at last). Based on the fact that the broadband speed ISPs sell to you is seldom achieved.

I'm only paying £11 per month for 8mb broadband plus all my phone calls are free, so I don't much care any more. On average I get 2-3mb speeds, on some sites (notably Microsoft.com) I get almost the full 8mb.

[Jesse Hopkins]

I guess nobody else here is making mobile Java games. I'm still stuck around 75KB. It sure would be strange to have an entire megabyte to play with...

Mobile is the last bastion of indie 8 bit and 16 bit aesthetic. I love working on mobile games because it's like working in black and white film.